Khadijah Queen Reads at Final Poetry Evening of the Term

Last Wednesday, the 8th of May, the last Poetry at Bennington welcomed Khadijah Queen for the last reading of the Spring semester 2024. 

Poetry faculty at Bennington college Michael Dumanis introduced Queen as the final reader for the 12th year of Poetry at Bennington along with her other accomplishments. From the Bennington Events page: “Khadijah Queen is ​the author of six books, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), a ​finalist for the Colorado Book Award and winner of the William Carlos ​Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her fifth book, I’m ​So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), ​was praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere ​as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male ​gaze inside out.” Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won ​the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance ​Writing. Individual ​poems, interviews, and essays appear in American ​Poetry Review, The Believer, Fence, Georgia Review, and Poetry. In 2022, she was awarded a Disability Futures fellowship​ from United States Artists. A Cave Canem alum, she is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech.” 

Equipped with a copy of her new book and her laptop, Queen took the podium and thanked Dumanis for the kind introduction: “Wow, that was dope. Thanks so much!” She also mentioned how much of a privilege it was to be there. 

She began her reading with a few poems from her most recent book Anodyne. She described one poem as being about the apocalypse, then moved on to some “sad girl” poems from 2016. She asked the audience if we wanted a long or short poem. (Long.) then a love poem or a rant? (Rant.) 

Queen almost offhandedly also revealed another book that’s coming out the summer after next, a memoir about her time in the Navy. 

She put her book away and opened her laptop to read some new poems. She read an ‘ADHD poem’ and a poem from her time in Italy. Her last poem was a rant-style poem about the general state of the world in the context of the war on Gaza.

After the reading, there were copies of her most recent book for sale at the table to the side of the podium.