Queer Poem-a-Day: Xandria Phillips "Want Could Kill Me"

Xandria Phillips is a Whiting Award-winning poet, and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a LAMBDA Literary Award, and the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging writers, Xandria is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. They have received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, Oberlin College, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and are the 2021-2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Fellow. Their current projects include an experimental nonfiction manuscript, a book of ekphrastic poetry, and an ever-growing visual art studio practice. Xandria's poetry has appeared in Berlin Quarterly Review, BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review and anthologies such as Best Experimental Writing (Weslyan Press 2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books 2020). Their paintings have been featured in Kenyon Review, The Poetry Project, and the cover of American Poets Magazine. For more, visit them at xandriaphillips.com. Instagram: @xandria_phillips Twitter: @xandriaphillips "Want Could Kill Me" was published in HULL (Nightboat Books) Check out another recent poem by Xandria Phillips here:  https://poets.org/poem/black-heroism-unskilled-labor Text of today's poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/ Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for our series is from Excursions Op. 20, Movement 1, by Samuel Barber, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by a generous donation from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library. Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.