Miss Settl

Kamden Hilliard is a nonbinary poet, educator, and scholar who lives in Cleveland, Ohio. They hold a BA in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kam is author of three chapbooks of poetry: distress tolerance (Magic Helicopter Press, 2016), perceived distance from impact (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), and henceforce: a travel poetic (Omnidawn Books, 2019). Kamden serves as a board member at VIDA: Women In Literary Arts, a reader at Flypaper Lit, and the 2020-2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing at The Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

"Like its title suggests, MissSettl is interested in unsettling the structures of language and logic, our assumptions about knowledge, literacy, belonging, and bodies, their institutionalized inscribing and cultural co-opting."—Chris Campanioni, Electric Literature"This is life and/or death poetry. This is love poetry to a most infinite degree of love pushing it/us beyond its/our known capacity."—Kirby Chen Mages, The Poetry Project"MissSettl, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s delightfully jarring debut collection, explodes assumptions about language, race, and American (post)colonialism in an age of information overload... A 21st century Dadaist or Metamodernist text, this collection demands that readers rethink the present state (and future!) of American poetics."—Diego Báez, Harriet"The power of these poems—and this interview—comes from Hilliard’s demonstration that there does exist the potential for further capaciousness and plasticity—of language, play, singing, thought, and (importantly) imagination—which can be enacted uncompromisingly against the internal and external sanctions that would seek to limit such efforts."—Peter Mishler, Full Stop"In reading MissSettl, meaning is coming to us already thrown out. Disposed of. As quickly as we’re asked to participate in this sense-making game, we’re cast into the ensuing gunfire of the speaker’s imagination." —Anaïs Duplan, Ghost Proposal"MissSettl uses big words and made-up words because they’re all the same. MissSettl explores first loves, sexual identity, identity, the absurdity of definition, and is constantly seeking to exist without the need for definition, without the need for justification."—Jacob Collins-Wilson, Heavy Feather Review“Kamden Hilliard is one of the most unique poets. Whether writing about blackness, settler colonialism, or racial capitalism, they ‘tricc’ syntax and form into something both ‘skinthicc’ and ‘metaphysiqule.’ MissSettl invites us to party inside the ‘weerd’ language of multiple selves dancing and transforming ‘queerdum.’”—Craig Santos Perez“Kamden Hilliard’s language addresses the present, wherein ‘thot’ replaces thought—and the military-industrial complex and its several violences has proven merely a ‘warflik’ we might choose to watch (or not). I’m continually drawn in by Hilliard’s ‘Nickelodeons,’ not just the one Nickelodeon (which is itself confined to a particular 90s moment we will relive) but the televisual multiplicity of myriad concurrent Nickelodeons that MissSettl evokes. Where else do we get to see, hear, or succumb to the dangerous play Hilliard is embroiled in here?”—Anaïs Duplan“In MissSettl, Hilliard unsettles QWERTY and queers linguistic bedrock to unlock readers from our own stiff poetic leanings and beliefs about the ‘Clotted sign, cloying signifier’ that celebrity and academicians alike accommodate for small change. These poems make hypersense, are tricksters baffling the OED with alphanumeric chimeras and lines so long they yawn at their pantomime because what they mimic bores with bullshit violence: ‘The university didn’t mean to offend that hair ,/ but was just so demographically curious about where you come from.’ MissSettl embraces everything Black and queer and I’m here for it, am shown how fuccd I am through these critiques of capitalism, ableism, and [insert hetero-entangled-ism]. No book has been this bitingly generous to me in years.”—Philip B. Williams“In MissSettl (Nightboat, Apr.), nonbinary poet Kamden Ishmael Hilliard pushes against everything that inhibits genuine love and genuine self.’”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal