Cassandra Whitaker (she/they) is a writer from the rural south. Their work has been published in various literary magazines and journals in the United States, and internationally, including Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, Lambda Literary, Conjunctions, The Bennington Review, & Carte Blanche, among others. Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring A Wolf is out from Jackleg Press.
Whitaker has received fellowships for theater and literary arts education and integration from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, The Maryland State Arts Council, Maryland Humanities, The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, The It Gets Better Foundation, and the Martha Vineyard Institute For Creative Writing, among others. She is an educator in rural Maryland, and lives in rural Virginia.
Whit’s work, as of late, includes exploring queer joy through the epithalamium and writing about/dialoguing with: emptiness, addiction & recovery, gender, sex & queerness, symbiotic mutualisms, bodies as social control mechanisms in education, chasing/manufacturing joy, fragility, and transformations. Their speculative fiction is eco-dystopian-centered with elements of horror and magic. Whitaker has been nominated for the Pushcart in fiction and poetry, and is a Best of the Net Nominee for poetry, and a nominee for Best New Poets and Best Spiritual Writing.
Whit’s previous iteration published a broadside with Broadsided Press, four chapbooks of poetry, a novel of weird fiction, as well short fiction, essays and poems in The Rumpus, The Scores, BODY, The Maine Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol IX: Virginia, and elsewhere. Whit’s previous iteration was also the winner of the Pink Poetry Prize from Great River Review, selected by Adrian Matejka, and the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize.
They are a National Book Critics Circle member. If you are a queer poet/writer and you wish Cassandra to review your work, query first, please.
Shoot them an email if you want to say hi!
Cass, Cassie, Cassandra, Whit, Mx. Whitaker
“Many are my names in many countries” Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers
the wolf's den 