Selected Readings x Conversations

Sponsored by The New School Creative Writing Program and Cave Canem Foundation.

Cave Canem presents Poets on Craft: Cyrus Cassells and Khadijah Queen.

Cyrus Cassells‘s poetry examines personal encounters with history, love and eroticism, and suffering and violence. His newest collection, The Gospel According to Wild Indigo (Southern Illinois University Press; March 5, 2018), was described by U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith as “an ecstasy, a god’s-eye-view of place, time, and the vivid revelations.” Cassells is also the author of The Mud Actor (1982), winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting (1994), winner of the William Carlos William Award; Beautiful Signor (1997), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; More Than Peace and Cypresses (2004); and The Crossed-Out Swastika (2012). He has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has received the Lannan Literary Award, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. Cassells, who also works as a translator, film critic, and actor, teaches at the MFA program at Texas State University-San Marcos. He lives in Austin. Khadijah Queen is the author of five books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Her verse play, Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press, 2015), won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women’s Performance Writing. The prize included a full staged production of the play at Theaterlab NYC from December 10 – 20, 2015 by Fiona Templeton’s The Relationship theater company. Individual poems and prose appear in Fence, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, The Offing, jubilat, Memoir, Best American Nonrequired Reading, DIAGRAM, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. She serves as core faculty in poetry and playwriting for the low residency Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University, and is Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing at University of Colorado, Boulder. Moderated by Jayson P. Smith, 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry.