Join us for the kickoff event of the 2021 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, featuring Khadijah Queen and Victoria Chang. This reading will open with a reading by the winners of our First Poem Contest: Samn Stockwell, Samantha DeFlitch, and Emily Joan Cooper.
Link to recording: https://salemstate.zoom.us/rec/share/WpinIUlaN9l-9sTkfymM-yoE5rpJGHlWe_n6Yruqp6gfpomVT4Sh0A1hKMwQWzBZ.ooICVTqtmgmuIl-s?startTime=1620946572000Khadijah Queen is the author of five books of poetry, most recently
I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, which was praised in
O Magazine, The
New Yorker,
Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating,” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” Earlier poetry collections include
Conduit (Akashic/Black Goat, 2008),
Black Peculiar (Noemi Press, 2011), and
Fearful Beloved (Argos Books, 2015). Her forthcoming collection,
Anodyne, will be published by Tin House Books in August 2020. Her verse play
Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press, 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. The prize included a full staged production of the play at Theaterlab NYC from December 10 - 20, 2015 by Fiona Templeton's The Relationship theater company. Individual poems and prose appear in
Poetry,
Fence,
Tin House,
American Poetry Review,
Buzzfeed,
Gulf Coast,
Poor Claudia,
The Offing,
jubilat,
Memoir,
Tupelo Quarterly,
DIAGRAM,
LitHub,
New Delta Review,
The Force of What's Possible, and elsewhere. Her 2019 op-ed on poetry and disability, co-edited with Jillian Weise, appeared in The
New York Times.
When asked about perceptions of her work as experimental, she responded, “Labels don’t disturb me as much perhaps as they should, mostly because I know they don’t truly define me or my work, just aspects. My 13-year-old son says to call it experimental could cause the work to not be treated as legitimately as it should.
Black Peculiar, I feel, does experiment with form/genre, just as my first book,
Conduit, experiments with language. But no one could successfully argue that the work isn’t poetry or isn’t literature, or that the intellectual and emotional undercurrents don’t come through.”
Queen received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Colorado, Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University.
Victoria Chang’s new book of poetry,
OBIT, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for a National Book Award, as well as longlisted for a PEN-Voeckler Award.
OBIT was also named a
TIME Magazine,
Publishers Weekly,
NPR,
Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, and a
New York Times Notable Book.
Other poetry books are
Barbie Chang,
The Boss,
Salvinia Molesta, and
Circle. She also edited an anthology,
Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation.
She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Katherine Min MacDowell Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and other awards. Her poems have been published in
Best American Poetry.
Her children’s picture book
Is Mommy? (Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster, 2015), was illustrated by Marla Frazee and was named a NYT Notable Book. Her middle-grade verse novel,
Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing in 2020.
She is a contributing editor at
Copper Nickel,
Tupelo Quarterly, and
On the Seawall.
She is the Program Chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA Program.
She lives in Los Angeles with her family and her weiner dogs, Mustard and Ketchup.
Learn more at
victoriachangpoet.com
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