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.
Born in Manhattan, New York, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Figueroa received her B.A in Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. She is a current Poetry MFA candidate at Rutgers-Newark '25 where she also teaches. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, Torch Literary Arts, Lolwe, and others. In 2019, she founded Mid-heaven Magazine, and online zine dedicated for weird and sad girl art & writing.
She 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. In 2024, Figueroa was awarded a 4-week writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center where she received the Civil Society Institute Fellowship, a prestigious award bestowed upon an individual who demonstrates exceptional creative talent and a commitment to their artistic practice.
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 ______
