Khadijah Queen is the author of five books of innovative poetry. Her full length collections are Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic Books 2008), featured in Poets & Writers’ Debut Poets issue; Black Peculiar, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press book award and published in 2011; FearfulBeloved (Argos Books 2015); and Non-Sequitur, a verse play published by Litmus Press in 2015. Non-Sequitur won the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance Writing and was staged by Fiona Templeton’s theater company The Relationship at Theaterlab in New York City in 2015. Individual poems and prose appear in Fence, Tin House, Poetry, American Poetry Review, jubilat, Fire and Ink: A Social Action Anthology, Best American Nonrequired Reading and widely elsewhere. Her fifth book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Balcones Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker award in Fiction. You can find reviews of her work in The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, BOMB Magazine, O Magazine, Boston Review and many other publications. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Colorado at Boulder, and serves as core faculty for in poetry the low-residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University. Her next book of poems, Anodyne, is forthcoming from Tin House in August 2020.
Mentor Statement
In teaching creative writing, I strive to be consistent, available, knowledgeable, and clear about expectations. Structurally, my classes combine practical knowledge and the nurturing of creative work via a number of methods, tailored to students' needs. Working in abstract, associative, conceptual and traditional forms in both writing and art, and very often mixing these styles in my own work, I move fluidly between modes and do not infuse my workshops with a single ideology or school of thought. Instead, I encourage students to become active in seeking knowledge on their own, offering many resources to aid them in finding the associations that most inspire them, and giving them tools and strategic guidance as they work through creative problems and questions in their own minds. I aim to create learning conditions that make students feel their opinions are valued, feel safe asking questions, and be well-trained in investigative inquiry through research, discussion, and creative and critical writing.
