R h e t o r i c a l
E n g i n e e r
Kailah Figueroa (she/her) is a rhetorical engineer, memory archivist, and part-time prose stylist. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Lampblack Magazine, Pigeon Pages, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Torch Literary Arts, wildness, and forthcoming in Callaloo Journal, and The McNeese Review. A Best New Poets and Pushcart Prize nominee, Figueroa has received support and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cave Canem Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, US-UK Fulbright Commission, and Vermont Studio Center.
Born in New York City and raised in Towson, Maryland, Figueroa received her BA in Creative Writing, and English: Publishing and Editing from Susquehanna University, and subsequently earned an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark where she taught Creative Writing to undergraduate students. Her manuscript in submission, Before The Bull Dreams Me (Poetry, full-length) was selected as a finalist for the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics 2025 Book Prize. She is working on a novel.
She loves fresh flowers, karaoke, Alice Coltrane and Ethel Cain; her biggest dream is for her and all her friends to live on the same street. You can follow her on Instagram, read her Newsletter, or visit her CV.