Khadijah Queen

My creative practice is driven by curiosity—research, reinvention, and the feeling of possibility. I write poetry, plays, criticism, memoir, and some secret fiction that may yet crawl out of its nurturing shadows. I see myself as multi-passionate, merging writing with a lifelong interest in history, visual art, and the creative process itself. My work often fluctuates between clarity and abstraction, intuited meaning and clear storytelling, emotion and intellect. The calibration of this impulse to allow apparent opposites to coexist in the same space, to approach each other without engaging in erasure, is endlessly fascinating to me. Usually, there is at least one aspect out of place whether in language or content or construction, something that insists on remaining strange or inscrutable—respecting what Édouard Glissant called opacity—and fully itself.

Khadijah Queen is a multidisciplinary writer whose work investigates the limits of form and narrative, exploring recurring themes such as the body, disability, self-empowerment, historical authenticity, Blackness, gendered existence, motherhood, and grief.

Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, including Anodyne (Tin House, 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and finalist for the Colorado Book Award. The poems in this collection capture the complex interplay between small, joyous moments and the looming threat of disaster, acknowledging the varied vicissitudes of the human experience. Other works by Queen include I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017); Fearful Beloved (Argos Books, 2015); Black Peculiar (Noemi Press, 2011); and Conduit (Akashic Books, 2008). Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press, 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing in 2014. The award included a full production at Theaterlab in New York City, which was directed by Fiona Templeton and performed by The Relationship theater company in 2015.

Queen’s works have appeared in several publications, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Harper’s Magazine, and The Poetry Review. Her book Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2025) examines the importance of understanding poetics beyond academic and artistic spaces, and how this understanding enriches everyday life. Queen’s memoir Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea is forthcoming from Legacy Lit/Hachette in fall 2025 and will explore her experiences serving in the U.S. Navy and brief histories of women at sea. She is currently at work on a new book of poems blending ekphrasis and ancient history that meditate on human mortality.

She is the recipient of a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2023) and was named a Disability Futures Fellow by the Ford Foundation and The Mellon Foundation (2022), an initiative administered by United States Artists.

Queen holds a Ph.D. in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver.