ABOUT ME
BIO
Brandon Blue is a black, queer poet, translator, educator and MFA candidate at Arizona State University from the D(M)V. He is an assistant editor for Storm Cellar Magazine.Their work is also featured in the Capital Pride Poem-a-Day event and has received the support from the Virginia G Piper for creative writing. His chapbook, Snap.Shot, has been published by Finishing Line Press and was named in Poetry Mutual’s Best Books of 2023.
Brandon also holds a M.ED from the University of Maryland, College Park in curriculum and instruction and B.A. in French Language and Culture. He worked as public school French teacher for 6 years and a creative writing mentor to young and developing writers for 4 years.
As a poet, educator, translator, and writer, I believe in the cathartic and transformational power of words. My artistic practice is one that encompasses a dialogue with myself and my community that I hold dear. I write with the belief that writing is not solely a definition but that that creates.
My work considers my experience of the contemporary Black queer experience through a lens of form (both invented and received), the ekphrastic, the body, the erotic, translation, and relation. By engaging with our contemporary moment in these particular ways, the oftentimes horrific moments become localized in the mind and body of the reader and expands the scope of how and when these events occur. And as a translator, I actively seek out, primarily black and/or queer francophone authors to translate into English not only to make their work more visible but as a way of globalizing the concerns and struggles of marginalized writers around the world. My work and practice is in awe of and in conversation with the work of Carl Philips, Alice Fulton, C. Dale Young, and Muriel Leung to name a few.
My debut chapbook, Snap.Shot (Finishing Line Press, 2023) confronts held narratives of black queer life and strives to answer questions of belonging, identity, and survival. In poems directed by personal narrative, engagement with art, and the erotic, Snap.Shot grounds the reader in a fragmented speaker in order to create a self resilient enough to brave devastation.
It is my hope that my work contributes to a larger, more diverse literary landscape that considers the overlaps and connections of struggles and joys on a global scale and between artistic mediums. I hope that my writing changes, grows, and challenges readers, and myself because writing, for me, is political and emotional and necessary.