Cart 0

Khadijah Queen

“Emotional adherence is part of my creative practice, and the difficulty some find in a disruptive logic I find exciting, all of which informs any syntactical pulse.”

2015 National Poetry Series Finalist

2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers

 

Read

Watch

Khadijah Queen outdoes herself with captivating poems examining the dualities of joy and pain, love and loss, knowing and ignorance.
Ms. Magazine
This is a powerful and dazzling collection, filled with wisdom and experience. Anyone who reads Anodyne will remember it for a long time.
— Ilya Kaminsky
I’m So Fine is an accumulation of the speaker’s seeming “chance” encounters with men, until K. Queen unzips these “chance” meetings to their bones exposing this: there is no “chance” no “un-intention” no “misunderstanding” when it comes to the language and gestures men are forever devising and revising against the female body’s sexualities and desires. This is an accumulation that is the feminine memory, that has had enough, that has disengaged from the old to create a new layering: the lines unbroken, the endless making as sweet as being out of the order other people like to think you are born to. This book is strength, is a critique, is subversive, is a woman, a fist, an lol, an F. U., a refusal, a gaze back at the gaze, is inevitable freedom wearing a flowered dress Kente cloth bomber jacket red lipstick white jeans a velvet choker white platform sandals a black turtleneck electric blue column dress an eggshell blouse with a high collar & pearl buttons is wearing a powerful woman’s body and mind.
— Natalie Diaz
The book is an investigation of celebrity culture and toxic masculinity that moves at a lyrical sprint, stuffed with characters and movements, with the ampersand often serving as the only available punctuation. We rush along with Queen, experiencing the world as she does, and wanting, like her, to desperately fight our way out of it.”
— Hanif Abdurraqib on I'm So Fine in The New Yorker
Khadijah Queen’s ingenious Non-Sequitur crashes the contemporary moment—a glut in bloated celebrity, wild brutality, status quo identity mongering. This cutting and finely attuned play features single-line-slinging speakers, often as object, artifact, consequence (i.e. THE BENT BUSINESS CARD, THE HAND-ME-DOWN PINKING SHEERS, THE BLONDE INSTITUTION) who/that ‘can sense your violent thoughts.’ Queen’s complex manifestations of race, sex, and desire rearrange bodies and material lives where ‘beauty behave[s] as a whip,’ animating perception and perspective into an ever surprising mix of the theater of the absurd and a febrile cultural unconscious, replete with deleted scenes, characters, and contradiction as illumination, like when THE HAPPY SINGLE reports: ‘I’m so ex-cited cuz I…ain’t a-bout it, hey heeeeyyyyyy!
— Ronaldo V. Wilson

Khadijah Queen holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver. She is the author of six innovative books of poetry, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her fifth book is I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.”

Queen’s verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. The award included a full production at Theaterlab in New York City, directed by Fiona Templeton. A hybrid essay about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine and was selected as a Notable Essay by Best American in 2020. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere.

She writes openly about disability and mental health; in 2022, United States Artists recognized her work with a $50,000 Disability Futures Fellowship. She is a Cave Canem alum, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), a multi-genre anthology of speculative works by writers from the global majority, praised in Lightspeed as "re-envisioning what an anthology is and how it works and to whom it speaks."

Her book of literary theory and criticism, Radical Poetics, is forthcoming in spring 2025 from the Poets on Poetry Series at University of Michigan Press.

 

Image GALLERY

Open and right-click to download