Fall 2022 | Khadijah Queen | Vol. 6, Iss. 2
Welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle, a publication of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Each issue gives you a 360-degree view of a Black poet, including an interview, new poems, a critical essay, and a writing prompt inspired by our featured poet.
Khadijah Queen, PhD, is the author of six books, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her fifth book is I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” A zuihitsu about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine and was selected as a Notable Essay by Best American in 2020. Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing, which included a staged production at Theaterlab NYC. Other books include Black Peculiar, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press book award, and Conduit (Black Goat 2008). Individual poems and essays appear in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK) and widely elsewhere. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech, and holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver.
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- Interview: Khadijah Queen talks with The Fight & The Fiddle editor-in-chief, Lauren K. Alleyne about activating theory in her evolving practice and the necessity of inclusive poetics.
- Critical Essay: Dr. dawn lonsinger’s critical review of Khadijah Queen’s Anodyne, “Reckoning & Reclamation,” examines how the poems in Queen’s collection tackles “the irreducible inextricability of point-blank pain and layered love.”
- Poems: Read “Choice,” “Better Living,” and “Bordeaux Aubade” by Khadijah Queen.
- Writing Prompt: Grid, Graph…Go!
Photo byT. Amari
Cover Design by Robert Mott