Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, most recently Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a memoir about her service in the U.S. Navy alongside brief histories of maritime women, published by Legacy Lit/Hachette Books in August 2025. With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), a multi-genre anthology of speculative writing by authors from the global majority. Individual works appear in Ploughshares, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s Magazine, LitHub, The Poetry Review (UK) and widely elsewhere. In 2025 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts recognized her work with the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry. Her next book is Black Women Writers At Work in the 21st Century (Haymarket February 2027), a collection of interviews with esteemed Black women/femme authors discussing their books, creative practices, and philosophies. Queen is a Cave Canem alum, a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow, a 2022 United States Artists Disability Futures fellow, and holds a Ph.D. in Literary Arts from University of Denver. She teaches creative writing and literary theory at Virginia Tech.