AWP | An Evening of Disability Poetry & Poetics

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Ukraine and currently lives in New Jersey. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic which was a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus (he/him) was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He’s a Cave

Canem Fellow and the author of 'To Sweeten Bitter' (UK, Out-Spoken Press), ‘The Perseverance’ (UK, Penned In The Margins / US, Tin House) and ‘All The Names Given’ (US, Tin House / UK, Picador) as well as children’s picture book ‘Can Bears Ski?’ (UK, Walker Books / US, Candlewick). He is the 2019 recipient of the Ted Hughes Award as well as the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, and became the first poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize. His first full-length collection, ‘The Perseverance’ was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and The Forward Prize, ‘All The Names Given’ was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize and the Costa Award. Also in 2021 his poems ‘The Perseverance’ and ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ were added to the UK’s Oxford, Cambridge and RSA ‘GCSE’ syllabus. He divides his time between London and New Orleans. Learn more at www.raymondantrobus.com.

Saleem Penny

Saleem Hue Penny (him/friend) is a Black, disabled poet expanding the pastoral tradition of the Southern Black Belt using a "rural hip-hop blues" aesthetic. Drum loops, field sounds, gouache, and birch bark commonly punctuate his poetry; these hybrid audio/mixed media pieces are released under the moniker h.u.e (hope – uplifts – everything).

Saleem is the 2021 Poetry Coalition Fellow at Zoeglossia, an Assistant Poetry Editor at Bellevue Literary Review, a member of Obsidian’s Inaugural “O|Sessions Black Listening” 2022 cohort, and a proud Cave Canem Fellow. Across poetic mediums, he explores how young people of color traverse wild spaces and define freedom on their own terms.

A mutual aid advocate and disability justice activist, he practices cultivating "Ecosystems of Care" centering

"Melanistic Wonderment". Saleem regularly collaborates on community engagement activities, particularly for teen parent-headed families, long-term pediatric patients, and families affected by incarceration.

He is compiling his first full-length poetry collection and pursuing archival research for ‘The Happy Land Liniment’ Project: an oral history, digital field guide, and chapbook-length lyric essay set in Reconstruction-era “Affrilachia”.

Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Other books include I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), 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.” Individual works appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Offing, Harper’s Magazine, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. With fiction writer K. Ibura, she co-edited an anthology of speculative writing, Infinite Constellations, available March 7, 2023. United States Artists recognized her work with a $50,000 Disability Futures Fellowship in 2022. She holds a PhD in English from University of Denver.