Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, a cultural critic, and the author of more than a dozen books, whose subjects have included opera, Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, hotels, humiliation, and Harpo Marx.  His latest book of prose is My 1980s & Other Essays (FSG, 2013).  Among his books of poetry are Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background, and Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, both published by Turtle Point Press.

Khadijah Queen holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of two poetry collections: Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic 2008), and Black Peculiar,which won the 2010 Noemi Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Switchback Books Gatewood Prize. Individual poems appear in jubilat, Spillway, Aufgabe, Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (University of Arizona Press 2009), Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton Mifflin 2010) and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems(University of Akron Press 2012) among many other journals and anthologies. Prose appears in Rattle, Cutthroat, Memoir, and The Force of What’s Possible, forthcoming from Nightboat in 2014. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, she is currently working on an illustrated mixed genre project.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.