LaTanya McQueen
Photo courtesy of LaTanya McQueen
Bio
LaTanya McQueen is the author of the essay collection And It Begins Like This (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and the novel When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial, 2021). Her stories and essays have been published in West Branch, TriQuarterly, Pleaides, New Ohio Review, the Arkansas International, the Florida Review, Bennington Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, Fourteen Hills, the North American Review, Ninth Letter, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, and was the 2017-2018 Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College.
Every time I try to think about what has happened, what receiving this award means, I feel a tightness in my chest and a raw ache in my throat, forming a choke, and I think of my mother who sacrificed so much in her life so that I could be allowed to dream just a little bit, so that I could even consider the possibility of pursuing writing as a worthwhile endeavor, and while it’s still been a long struggle for me filled with a lot of my own years of job insecurity, of part-time and low-paid work, I dreamed anyway in the hope that one day I could show her that her sacrifices weren’t all in vain.
While my mother died long before I could ever show her the path I’d managed to carve out for myself, I still think of her with everything that I write. My mother lived a life of invisibility. She was never seen in the ways she should have been. I write for her, for other women like her, and for women like me—those who’ve felt invisible their whole lives, not counted, never seen. This award will let me continue to do this work, but for the first time in my entire life, I can do it with a little bit of freedom, and that means the world.