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 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 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 Fence, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, The Offing, jubilat, DIAGRAM and elsewhere. A zuihitsu about the pandemic, "False Dawn," appeared in Harper's Magazine in August 2020.
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. In fall 2021 she will join the creative writing faculty at Virginia Tech.