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Khadijah Queen

Biography

Born near Detroit and raised in Los Angeles, Queen is an African-American writer whose multidisciplinary literary practice spans poetry, hybrid prose, creative nonfiction, criticism, and performance writing. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver.


Queen is the author of eight books, including Anodyne, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, Black Peculiar, Fearful Beloved, Non-Sequitur, and the 2025 memoir Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran's Memoir. Her 2025 book Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture examines literature, culture, and radical approaches to literary practice.


Her work has appeared in publications including Harper's, Ploughshares, The Believer, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Yale Review. Queen has received a United States Artists Disability Futures Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the 2025 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Queen has also written publicly about being on the asexual spectrum, connecting questions of intimacy, care, protection, and nurturing to her understanding of relationships and selfhood.


BQW Impact

Queen's literary practice creates space for Black women's experiences while engaging questions of race, gender, sexuality, embodiment, memory, and power. Her work moves between personal and political registers, using experimental forms to examine the complexities of identity and lived experience.


Her identification as a queer person on the asexual spectrum adds an important dimension to her literary exploration of intimacy, sexuality, and the body. Her work also contributes to broader conversations about Black literature, disability, military experience, and experimental literary form.


Notable Works

  • Black Peculiar (2011)

    Poetry collection examining race and history, media and culture, sex and gender, and the relationship between personal experience and political life.

  • Non-Sequitur (2015)

    Verse play that won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance Writing and received a staged production in New York City.

  • I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (2017)

    Poetry collection engaging the male gaze, gender, power, memory, and personal experience.

  • Anodyne (2020)

    Poetry collection that won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and examines the tension between ordinary moments and larger experiences of hardship and uncertainty.

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