Very excited that Khadijah Queen will be a 2025 Visiting Writer at Longleaf Writers Conference this year. I am reading her poetry collection, Anodyne (Tin House Books, 2020). “In the event of an apocalypse, be ready to die,” the opening poem in the collection, proves prescient for today’s reader:

“But do also remember, gardens,
herbaria. Repositories of beauty now
ruin to find exquisite—”

The speaker gives space for the “forsaken” and “disappeared” and “inert,” warning that we could “lose it all.” There is such beauty in Queen’s lines and movements as she considers the ruins that the reader cannot help but feel, especially in the new world order. “Ruin to find exquisite—” Truth, as the exquisite, some days, can only be found in the ruins. READ MORE

About Anodyne

The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure―all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live. READ MORE

About Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is the author of several books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose. Her memoir, Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea, is forthcoming in August 2025. A book of criticism, Radical Poetics: Essays on Literature & Culture, was published by the Poets on Poetry Series at University of Michigan Press in January 2025. With K. Ibura, she co-edited Infinite Constellations (FC2 2023), an anthology of speculative writing by authors from the global majority. Her most recent poetry book is 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, which included a full production at Theaterlab in New York City, directed by Fiona Templeton and performed by The Relationship theater company. A zuihitsu about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, was named a Notable Essay of 2020 in Best American Essays (HarperCollins 2021), and reprinted in the anthology Bigger Than Bravery (2023), edited by Valerie Boyd. Individual poems, interviews, and essays appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The Believer, Orion, Fence, Poetry, Yale Review, The Offing, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. In 2022, she was awarded a Disability Futures fellowship from United States Artists. A Cave Canem alum, she holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver, an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and teaches literature, poetics, and all genres of creative writing. In 2025, she received the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is currently working on a new book of poetry. READ MORE

Rae Cline

Rae Cline is the author of PRECIOUS UGLY, a debut novel (coming August 18, 2026 from 7.13 Books). She is also the author of the short story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. Her stories, essays, and prose poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and more. She earned an M.A. in Writing from John Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction from American University. A teacher for thirty-five years, she taught writing and literature at the secondary level as well as at her alma maters, the International Writing Program at Iowa State University, and other campuses. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg, where she writes the Openings column, and the founder of the Warm Words Project, a homeless and domestic violence outreach initiative. Born in Ohio, she now splits her time between New York City and the Gulf of Mexico. PRECIOUS UGLY is now available for preorder. Read more at raecline.com.