Kailah Figueroa (she/her/hers) is a rhetorical engineer, memory archivist, and part-time prose stylist. Her research-based lyrical and hybrid writing, experiments with form, shape, and challenges “linear” story telling by embodying the call and response of the Jazz tradition. Like composters orchestrating an arrangement, she is a poet who transposes the residue of human connections into lyric, using improvisation and repetition to tell a narrative of Blackness that’s not solely a track record of the violences white people have committed against them.
Kailah Figueroa is a rhetorical engineer, memory archivist, and part-time prose stylist. Her poetry is forthcoming and published in wildness, Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, Torch Literary Arts, Pigeon Pages, Cincinnati Review, Lampblack, Ploughshares, among others.
Born in Manhattan, New York, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, at eighteen-years-old, Figueroa founded Mid-heaven Magazine, and online zine dedicated for weird and sad girl art & writing. Figueroa was a 2021 recipient of the Fulbright UK Summer Institute at the University of Bristol: Arts, Activism, and Social Justice. And in 2023, she was a Pushcart Prize nominee for her poem “After My Bipolar Diagnosis I Make Several Phone Calls and Everyone Says That Makes Sense” published in Torch Literary Arts. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2024 Anthology for her poem “When I Was a Boxer” published in The Cinncinatti Review. In 2024, Figueroa was awarded a 4-week writing residency at Vermont Studio Center where she received the Civil Society Institute Fellowship. In 2025, she was a Just Buffalo Literary Poetry Finalist and was awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She received her B.A in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University, and holds a MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark.
She likes karaoke, fresh flowers, Alice Coltrane, Ethel Cain, playing pool, reading by candle light, and vintage designer shoes. You can see more of her on Instagram @kailahfigueroa or here, on her Substack newsletter, The Saddest Girl in ______
