Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen is an American poet and playwright whose work spans multiple genres and modes — from lyric poetry to experimental theater, from documentary poetics to the book-length conceptual project — always driven by a commitment to exploring Black experience, femininity, and the conditions of visibility and erasure in contemporary America. Queen grew up in California and the American South and brings to her poetry a richly textured sense of place, history, and the complexities of identity across race and gender. She holds an MFA and has taught creative writing at institutions including the University of Colorado Boulder and New York University.
Her collections include Black Peculiar (2011), winner of the Noemi Press Book Award, Conduit (2008), Fearful Beloved (2015), and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On (2017), a striking conceptual work that catalogues encounters with famous men through the perspective of what the speaker was wearing — a feminist intervention that transforms the list poem into a form of testimony. Her collection Anodyne (2020), published by Tin House Books, received widespread critical praise for its formally inventive and emotionally powerful engagement with grief, healing, and Black womanhood.
Queen’s theatrical work includes the verse play Non Sequitur, which was performed at the American Repertory Theater, demonstrating her range across literary forms and her interest in the relationship between poetry and performance. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, Fence, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and other organizations.
Queen is a significant figure in contemporary American literature, recognized for the breadth of her formal experimentation and the depth of her engagement with questions of race, gender, and power. Her work is consistently original, intellectually serious, and grounded in a commitment to making visible what has been overlooked or silenced. She is one of the more adventurous and essential voices in poetry today.