Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality.

After leaving California and moving east, Bashir worked in magazine publishing and briefly taught high school.

Her mother Pamela Adelle Hilliard, an African-American woman from Detroit, and her father Abdirahman Mohammed Bashir, a first generation Somali immigrant, met at Eastern Michigan University.

Inspired by the work of June Jordan and Toni Morrison,[3] Bashir decided to focus on writing, and moved to the Bay Area after the 1992 riots.

[6] Bashir graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in the Literature of American Ethnic Cultures from Berkeley in 1994.

Bashir worked as an editor and writer for various publications such as Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, and Curve.

[11] Bashir co-edited Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Art & Literature (2002) with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana.

[12] She wrote "June Jordan: A critical biography" which was included in Greenwood Press' Contemporary American Women Poets: An A-to-Z Guide (2003).

The collection works around a central sequence of "coronagraphs" which form a crown of sonnets on the legend of John Henry and his wife Polly Ann.

Bashir has published and written on topics such as social justice, the body, femininity, public health and the African diaspora.

[23] In October 2017 the Regional Arts & Culture Council awarded Bashir an Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in recognition of her achievements.

[30] Field Theories won a Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award in 2018, and the titular poem of the collection received a Pushcart Prize in 2019.

Bashir's I Hope This Helps was part of the American Academy in Rome's annual Cinque Mostre exhibit in February 2020.

She collaborated on the "Twenty Seventh Night: A Chamber Opera in 8 minutes" with Michael-Thomas Foumai, which premiered at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

[10] In February 2019, Bashir presented The Lushness of Print, an exhibition of collaborative poetry broadsides with Letra Chueca Press.

Bashir created a series of six video poems based on Field Theories with artist Roland Dahwen Wu and choreographer Keyon Gaskin.