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Thursday, May 13 • 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Headline Reading with Victoria Chang and Khadijah Queen

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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=1620946572000

Khadijah 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


Speakers
avatar for Samantha DeFlitch

Samantha DeFlitch

Samantha DeFlitch is the author of Confluence (Broadstone Books, 2021). She is the Associate Director of the Connors Writing Center at the University of New Hampshire, where she completed her MFA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Missouri Review... Read More →
avatar for Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including Anodyne (TinHouse Books, 2020), and 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... Read More →
avatar for Emily Cooper

Emily Cooper

Writer, Musician, Child at Heart
Emily Cooper is a Midwest ex-pat, volunteer farmer, and board member at Newhall Fields Community Farm, a Rotarian, and a community activist who enjoys bringing people together. She is currently a working author, artist, and musician. In 2019 she published her first book—a sele... Read More →
avatar for Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang

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... Read More →
avatar for Samn Stockwell

Samn Stockwell

Samn Stockwell has published in Agni, Ploughshares, and the New Yorker, among others. Her two books, Theater of Animals, and Recital, won the National Poetry Series (USA) and the Editor’s Prize at Elixir, respectively. Recent poems are in On the Seawall & Sugar House Review and... Read More →


Thursday May 13, 2021 7:00pm - 8:30pm EDT
Online