In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Khadijah Queen discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, senior content editor at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for July, Khadijah Queen. Khadijah is the author of Anodyne and the upcoming memoir Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Khadijah, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Queen: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for July?

Queen: Well, I think we see a lot of familiar names in poetry, and certainly there are some that appear here, but I wanted to choose poems from writers whose poetry I have missed reading. I wanted a variety of regions and styles, and initially, content as well. I also love the idea of balancing the exuberance of midsummer with the slowed down reflections that poems can offer.

But a theme started to emerge as I was reading through the submissions, and so many of the poems wrestled with language itself, like what words mean, their power and speech, and in books, the structure and implications of language, its usages, and the role of poetry in the world. There was grief, certainly, for loved ones, for homelands, for ancestors, for imperiled futures, and I think, where else but poetry can we make room for that depth of difficult feeling? And where else can we hold ideas or emotions that seem to oppose each other in the same space, that’s in a poem?

And as a reader, I enjoy a poem that respects my capacity to receive and process contradiction and to deepen my empathy for the full range of human experience.

Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem on Poets.org, or more than one poem, that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Queen: Well, there are so many, and I hope readers will be inspired to really explore the collected poems online at Poets.org often. I certainly did that as a young poet. I still do it now. I still use it to teach, but one in particular is Lyn Hejinian’s “Time of Tyranny, 49,” which actually fits with the language-focused theme that has emerged in the poems that I curated this month. And I just love the use of sound in this poem. The alliteration is not subtle, but it is cleverly embedded, and the sentences are just long and winding and use enjambment, and it really rewards, like, it rewards verbal delivery and by the end it seems almost to unravel. And this image system in the poem uses these simple words, like “eyes” or “glass” or “bread” or “stones” or “forest” or “rabbit,” but they have broad symbolism and they evoke movement and elementality and sustenance that requires tending and interaction. It's one of those poems that just gets richer after each rereading.

Poets.org: And what are you reading right now?

Queen: Ooh, I typically read a lot of books at once. So I just finished a novel called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon because I went to see the play in Albania, and the spectacular interpretation by the really super talented theatrical team at Teatri Metropol helped to counter what some might view as stereotypes in the book. And they involved autistic folks in every aspect of the production, including the acting.

I know I’m talking about the play, but like, just let me cook. The play included this really creative use of lighting and visual effects, and that was used to capture the interiority, like the expansiveness and complexity of feeling and thought that the main character’s mind held in the novel. So I really recommend that book if you get a chance to have a look.

On my to-read pile, I’m most way through Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard. I’m part-way through my friend Phillip B. Williams’s monumental novel, Ours, and I’m savoring Josephine Baker’s memoir, Fearless and Free, which I found in this cute little London bookshop.

And for poetry, I just started Silver by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and gestalt by Karenjit Sandhu, and I picked those up also in London at South Kensington Books.

Poets.org: That Josephine Baker memoir is on my, not my to-read list, but my to-listen list, because I’m a big consumer of audiobooks in my free time, and I’m very curious at [sic] ... because I wrote my master’s thesis on Josephine Baker, so she’s long been a figure of fascination for me, personally. I’m wondering how much that memoir is going to deviate from and enhance upon the memoir that came out in the 1970s cowritten with her final husband, Jo Bouillon.

Queen: [laughs] I didn’t know about that one. I didn’t read that one, but ooh.

Poets.org: That one is out of print and, yeah, that was cowritten with him. So I’m curious about how this one will be different. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Queen: Well, I’m working on some poems. I am preparing for the book launch. I’m trying to think of it less as work these days and more like exploration. Since I’m doing all of this traveling, I’m just letting the poems arrive as I’m reading and observing. So there’s a good number that it’s going to be a book soon, I can tell, but I think I’ve got a little bit more traveling to do. I’m also writing essays and some dramatic scenes, some fiction. I don’t know exactly what those will be yet. So multiple projects, I think, and I’m enjoying that discovery process.

I just finished my memoir a few months ago, and it will be out in August. It’s twenty years in the making. It’s a memoir that blends stories about my time in the Navy in the 1990s with these short histories of women sailors and merchants and pirates from hundreds of years in many different countries. And that research gets integrated really smoothly. I kind of went back and forth with my editor about it, but I think that her feedback got me to put it in there, like, in a smooth way, and I think it makes an engrossing read that shows, like, echoes and parallels of women’s experiences over time and place, and shares stories that have been suppressed or overlooked and hidden in the archives that I had to go searching in as well as memory.

What else? Oh, I’m teaching more fiction these days, which is exciting. I loved teaching fiction for young people last spring, and I hope I’ll get to do it again. One of the books we read that I recommend is The Book of Mean People, which is written by Toni Morrison and her son, Slade. It is so funny and so wise and very timely for this moment, and I think it’s empowering for all ages.

What else? I feel like there’s more stuff. Oh, I had a book come out in January, which is Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture. It’s my first book of literary theory and criticism, and it talks about how we stay focused on what words actually mean. How do we integrate what we know by heart and by physical knowing or intuition? How do we integrate that with our intellectual knowing or facts? And I try to answer that through literary analysis.

In the spirit of the brilliant Angela Davis, she has a quote from Women, Culture & Politics that “[r]adical simply means grasping things at the root.” So we want to go back to the root of what things actually mean versus tearing out the original meaning and trying to layer on things that are false, that ring false. So after all of that, and it’s been a lot of writing, a lot of research, it feels really wonderful to be composing those poems again and to be writing travel essays and writing is always a restorative practice, especially when I can focus on poetry.

Poets.org: Speaking of poetry, I first discovered your work when I read I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On. You had already published a couple of collections before this, but this collection of prose poems came out in 2017, which was the start of the “Me Too” era. It investigates, for those who don’t know, it investigates celebrity culture, unhealthy expressions of masculinity, and how these conditions impact each other. I’m curious about what your reflections on that book are now, almost a decade after it’s come out, especially since you’ve been doing this work on intuition, the tension between intuition and intellectualism, and also of course, this work on your memoir, which deals with the history of women in the military, which is at times a fraught history. I’m curious about how you feel about that collection now, what you think its impact has been, what you've hoped its impact has been, and what you’ve learned in the years since.

Queen: That’s a big question. I really love that book. It was a lot of fun to write. Even though it was intense at times. It came out of audience engagement. That’s my favorite thing about it, was that I just started randomly writing these lists of famous people that I met and what I was wearing as part of Poem-a-Day, which was interestingly [sic], we would have this group that would share work every day for an entire month just for accountability. And one day I didn’t have a poem, so I just wrote this top ten list, but that was a thing that everybody responded to. And when I would read them, they were like, “Are you going to write more of those?” And I was like, “I guess I could write more of those.” I had so many stories. So then I started to shape them into actual poems and reading them.

And I think the connection was so consistent across, like, places and audiences because people understand the need to be seen with dignity and respect, and to have that be denied, it marks you. And when it goes well, it’s such a joy. So there are two sides to that coin because it’s not “all men are terrible.” That’s not what that book is about. It’s more about: how do I move in the world with self-respect and try to be unharmed in a space that can be really hostile to women?

I think that book still makes me happy. I was talking to somebody the other day, they were like, “You should record those and put them on Tik-Tok.” I’m not on Tik-Tok [laughs], so I haven’t done that, but maybe I should. Maybe I should rethink.

And in this time that we’re in, that tries to deny history and deny women’s contributions, deny the contribution of anybody who’s not a rich white man, it’s really wild to me because we live in a world that has been populated by a diverse kinds of peoples since time began. And so to deny that is absurd.

To pretend that just because somebody has a certain anatomy that they can’t contribute or that their contribution demands erasure in order for someone else’s contribution to be valued, it’s a little bit weird. It’s weird, and it’s silly, and I think it sets us back as a collective humanity.

So a book that seems like, you know, a silly little list of what a girl was wearing when she’s walking down the street and the celebrity she met is actually about how we see one another too. How we see ourselves and how we see one another. And it’s more important than ever that we get that right.

Poets.org: And also about how we’ve been taught to see each other, because you deal in that book, you talk about encounters with a number of men who were very famous music artists in the 1990s, especially artists in hip-hop and R&B. And while I was reading that book, I was just thinking about how, you know, some of those people’s videos have been constructed. That was the video vixen era, right? So those of us who grew up watching those videos, you’re taught to look at women in a certain way. You’re taught to consider how men approach women or should approach women in a certain way. Now we know how wrong and self-defeating so much of that was, and the book touches on those themes without explicitly saying that it’s doing that, which is something I really appreciated about those prose poems. I also appreciate the wonderful work you’ve done for this July curation. Thank you so much, and thank you so much for this interview. I’m looking forward to reading that memoir too.

Queen: Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it. It’s been such a gift to spend time with these poems and to try to gather work that affirms the importance of language right now and of art.

Poets.org: Agreed.