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

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The Repetition of the Wound

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“Throughout, Queen is by turns vulnerable and fierce, making resonant observations about the complexities of war, womanhood, and perseverance. Readers will find much to admire.”

— Publisher's Weekly on Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

“Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a large-hearted, compulsively readable memoir shot through with courage and razor-sharp intelligence. Moreover, Queen’s magnificent personal reckoning helps me to ponder what new forms of relation might be possible between ourselves, our nation, and the many institutions charged with stewarding the common good.”

— Tracy K. Smith

“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 is the author of eight books of innovative poetry, hybrid prose, and creative nonfiction. Her most recent book is Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran’s Memoir (Legacy Lit, 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 the 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.