This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event. 

Charis welcomes Khadijah Queen in conversation with W.J. Lofton for a discussion of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran's Memoir, a coming-of-age memoir about family, survival, and one servicewoman’s search for autonomy by award winning poet Khadijah Queen.

Yanked out of college and torn from her sunny hometown of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Khadijah Queen finds herself sharing a basement apartment with her mother and sister and working two retail jobs in snowy, tiny Inkster, Michigan. Longing to escape the cycle of her family’s poverty, incarceration, and addiction, she joins the US Navy, determined to earn money to finish college and make it back to L.A. on her own terms.

But soon after Queen completes her grueling training and boards a doomed destroyer, she finds herself faced with near-constant sexual harassment, demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism. Stuck on a ship with nowhere to hide, she looks to poetry, literature, and letters from home to get through the long days and maintain her dignity. She keeps her head down until the workplace hostility against women spills over into her dating life and threatens to derail everything she has worked for.

In trying to break through the unspoken code of silence between sailors, Queen must decide where her loyalties lie: with the Navy or within herself. Unflinching and masterfully penned, this memoir questions the promises of service to reveal the true price of being a woman at sea.

Khadijah Queen holds a PhD in English and literary arts from the University of Denver. She is the author of seven books of poetry and prose. Her work appears and has been praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. Queen is a Cave Canem alum, a 2022 United States Artists Disability Futures Fellow, a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow, and holds the 2025 Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She divides her time between the US, the UK, and France.

W.J. Lofton, a Chicago-born poet and Alabama raised multimodal artist, is the author of A Garden for Black Boys Between the Stages of Soil and Stardust  and his newest collection boy maybe  (Beacon Press, Spring 2025). A recipient of Ava DuVernay's LEAP Grant and an artist-in-residency at 100West, Lofton has earned fellowships from Cave Canem and Emory University. His work has been featured or forthcoming in TIME, wildness, Obsidian, Scalawag, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, American Poets Magazine, Prose to the People, No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, and film festivals nationwide. Lofton’s constant concern is liberation and its lived manifestations; the personal, political, and collective. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia where he co-curates Rebellion: A Writing Salon, alongside Dominic Anthony Williams.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.

Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website. 

In-person event guidelines:

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.

We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.

This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast.

As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.

By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran's Memoir -- Khadijah Queen in Conversation with W.J. Lofton