Khadijah Queen - Böcker

Literature has the power to help build a shelter in language for a way of being that holds integrity and love as its root. In the tradition of Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and many other Black writers and theorists, poet and professor Khadijah Queen observes questions of life and literature, human feeling and behavior, and explores language-based solutions to common cultural conflicts that are often rooted in harmful assumptions. Instead of operating from a base of unquestioned thought and systemic tradition, Radical Poetics presents more inclusive and accurate ways of contemplating literary work. Building on ideas and theoretical practices from Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Queen reads for where love is present as well as for where it is absent—tracing systems of thought and aesthetic choices to track how characters are portrayed in terms of race, gender, class, and disability. She analyzes short stories, novels, nonfiction narratives, poetry, and a play from authors such as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Dionne Brand, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Natasha Trethewey, and Muriel Rukeyser. Queen’s essays offer shifts in thinking about language—beyond calling out the ways language punishes vulnerability, entrenches harm, and suppresses true intercultural communication. Her intuitive approach aims to correct inaccuracies that have served as a foundation for the discriminatory thinking that undergirds American institutions and culture, particularly the continued glorification of violence. Radical Poetics makes a case for the imperative and practical value of understanding poetics beyond artistic and academic spaces and into everyday life.

It's the late 1990s-Tupac is taking over radio waves, Inkster, Michigan is as Midwest as ever, and a young Khadijah Queen has just been recruited to join the U.S. Navy while working her day job at RadioShack. In light of her dwindling college tuition fund, her mother's alcoholism and sisters' addictions, and an impending future of minimum wage retail jobs, Bootcamp doesn't sound so bad.But soon after Khadijah completes her grueling training and boards her ship, finds herself in even more traumatic situations among strangers far from home. Surrounded by men in the sonar room, she struggles to maintain her dignity day after day while dealing with near-constant sexual harassment, weeks-long demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism from her coworkers. At first, she tries to bring honor to herself, her family, her division, and the navy, taking pride in her work while studying to become an officer and leaning on poetry to lift her spirits. Queen begins to wonder the issues she is faced with are worth what she was promised.Queen must conceal a miscarriage, a subsequent pregnancy, and domestic violence while enlisted. She must decide where her loyalties lie: the life that was prescribed to her, or the new, unknown life that awaits her? Masterfully penned, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a searing chronicle about family, survival and autonomy, and one woman's attempt to content with a workplace that is hostile to women.

A gathering of innovative, speculative fictions by writers of color, both established and emerging  The innovative fictions in Infinite Constellations showcase the voices and visions of 30 remarkable writers, both new and established, from the global majority: Native American/First Nation writers, South Asian writers, East Asian writers, Black American writers, Latinx writers, and Caribbean and Middle Eastern writers. These are visions both familiar and strange, but always rooted in the mystery of human relationships, the deep honoring of memory, and the rootedness to place and the centering of culture.The writers in this anthology mirror, instruct, bind and unbind, myth-make and myth-invert, transform and transmute, make us belly-laugh or hum our understanding, gasp or whisper gently, and remember that sometimes we need to holler and fight as we grieve. Any dangers herein, imagined or observed in poem and story, transport us: moving from latent to extant, then unleashed.This work does not presume; it presents and blossoms, creating a constellation of appearances, a symphony of belonging.“In collecting this work,” note editors Khadijah Queen and K. Ibura, “we felt humbled by the love threaded throughout the voices speaking to us in stories and poems that vault beyond expectation and settle in our consciousness as an expansion of what’s possible when we tend to one another with intention. We felt lifted, held aloft in these arrangements of language. We hope that as you read each story and poem, you will find the same sense of empowerment and celebration that we know has sustained us over countless generations, and in their beauty and humor and intelligence and complexity, continue to enrich us still.”CONTRIBUTORSGeorge Abraham / Kenzie Allen / Shreya lla Anasuya / Thea Anderson / Wendy Chin-Tanner / Alton Melvar M. Depanas / Yohanca Delgado / Jennifer Elise Foerster / Aerik Francis / AndrÉ O. Hoilette / Brian K. Hudson / K. Ibura / Pedro Iniguez / Ruth Ellen Kocher / Ra’Niqua Lee / Tonya Liburd / Kenji C. Liu / Shalewa Mackall / Lucien Darjeun Meadows / Melanie Merle / Juan J. Morales / Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint / Cindy Juyound Ok / Daniel JosÉ Older / Soham Patel / Lynn C. Pitts/ Kahadijah Queen / Sheree RenÉe Thomas /  Sarah Sophia Yanni / dg nanouk okpik / shakirah peterson