Kellie Richardson is a Black, queer writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. Kellie’s work primarily explores themes of love, loss and longing, with particular attention to how those themes intersect with Black American humanity. Kellie’s relationship with writing is defined by the metamorphosis that happens when art is a liberatory practice.

As Tacoma’s Poet Laureate from 2017-2019, Kellie leveraged her role to experiment with form, incorporating collage and interactive performance into her writing. She created and curated three Tacoma Summer SOULstice Festivals, an event centering LGBTQ and BIPOC writers and artists. Each of Kellie’s projects is another re-invention and re-imagining of form and technique. Kellie has released two collections of her work, What Us Is and The Art of Naming My Pain, both published by Blue Cactus Press. Sometimes through provocation or confession, other times through belly laughs or tears, Kellie works to celebrate the beauty and power of everyday folk and put some funk into the dread we call survival.

Kellie is working on her manuscript in progress, a hybrid work that explores what happens as she seeks to find, heal, and discover herself after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

The core questions explored in her project are:

What is the connection between environment and cancer/chronic illness?

How do these connections drive the way Black bodies experience the medical-industrial complex?

How can Black cancer fighters and survivors seek healing by recalibrating our relationship to the natural and non-speaking world?