MFA Event - Visiting Hurst Professor, Kadijah Queen
See the full event poster HERE.
Craft Lecture: Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 8:00 pm
Reading: Thursday, Sept. 29 at 8:00 pm
Both events hosted in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall Rm. 201
These events are limited to members of the MFA Program.
Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Anodyne (Tin House Books, 2020), which Ilya Kaminsky called “dazzling.” Her other books include I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, which was praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating,” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out,’ Conduit (Akashic / Black Goat 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. The prize included a full staged production of the play at Theaterlab NYC from December 10 - 20, 2015 by Fiona Templeton's The Relationship theater company. Individual poems and prose appear in Poetry, Fence, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, Poor Claudia, The Offing, jubilat, Memoir, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, LitHub, New Delta Review, The Force of What's Possible and elsewhere. Her 2019 op-ed on poetry and disability, co-edited with Jillian Weise, appeared in The New York Times.
When asked about perceptions of her work as experimental, she responded, “Labels don’t disturb me as much perhaps as they should, mostly because I know they don’t truly define me or my work, just aspects. My 13-year-old son says to call it experimental could cause the work to not be treated as legitimately as it should. Black Peculiar, I feel, does experiment with form/genre, just as my first book, Conduit, experiments with language. But no one could successfully argue that the work isn’t poetry or isn’t literature, or that the intellectual and emotional undercurrents don’t come through.”
Queen received her Ph.D in English from the University of Denver, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at University of Colorado, Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University.