Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is ​the author of eight books of innovative poetry, hybrid prose, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir, Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea, was published in August 2025. A book of criticism, Radical ​Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture, was published by the Poets on Poetry Series at University of Michigan Press in January 2025. With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), an anthology of speculative writing by authors from the global majority. Her most recent poetry book is Anodyne (Tin House 2020), a ​finalist for the Colorado Book Award and winner of the William Carlos ​Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her fifth book, I'm ​So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), ​was 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.” Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won ​the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance ​Writing, which included a full production at Theaterlab in New ​York City, directed by Fiona Templeton and performed by The ​Relationship theater company. A zuihitsu about the pandemic, ​“False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, was named a Notable ​Essay of 2020 and ​was reprinted in the anthology Bigger Than Bravery (2023), edited by Valerie Boyd. Individual ​poems, interviews, and essays appear in Ploughshares, American ​Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Believer, Orion, Fence, Poetry,​ Yale Review, The Offing, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely ​elsewhere. In 2022, she was awarded a Disability Futures fellowship from United States Artists. A Cave Canem alum and Civitella Ranieri Fellow, she holds a PhD in ​English and Literary Arts from University of Denver. As a creative writing professor, she has taught American literature, poetics, and all genres of ​creative writing at University of Colorado at Boulder, Regis University, and Virginia Tech. In 2025, she received the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is currently writing a new book of poetry and a collection of travel essays. You can subscribe to her Substack or find her on BlueSky.