Xandria Phillips is a writer, educator, and abstract artist from rural Ohio. Their work often dishevels the line between personal and collective in regards to generational trauma facing queer people of African descent. Their books include Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine, and HULL (Nightboat Books 2019), which won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry. Xandria’s paintings have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Poetry Project, and American Poets Magazine. HULL’s cover features Xandria’s original gouache painting “Linear Compounds.”

The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, Oberlin College, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Xandria is also a Dream Space Residency recipient at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and their poem, "For a Burial Free of Sharks" is the winner of the 2016 GIGANTIC Sequins Poetry Contest judged by Lucas de Lima. Their poetry has been featured in BOMB Magazine, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review and anthologies such as Best Experimental Writing (Weslyan Press 2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books 2020).

Prior to working with Brown, Xandria was the First Wave Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2019-20).