Debra McQueen has had 37 residences in her adult life, from a boat on the Pacific to a tract home in Suburbia. Silicon Valley is where she started, and Denver is where she most recently wound up.
Along the way, she worked for slumlords, criminal attorneys, a Ponzi schemer, and one vegan activist group that never found out about her secret T-bone addiction. She's been a sous chef, a slam poet, a snorkel guide, a navigator, a word processor, a beauty supply buyer, and yes, a bad girlfriend.
Nowadays she rides motorcycles in the Rockies, writes poetry and memoir, and teaches special education. Sometimes she can be found at Denver's Moth StorySLAM.
Bad Girlfriend is her first book.
what she's like
"Santa Cruz, San Diego, San Francisco. Lucky's, Karma, and Cher. Debra McQueen's poetry is a litany to what is beautiful, sexy, lonely, sad and searching for its own heart through its own body in America. These are poems for every woman (and the fabulous men!) who have been the bad girlfriend -- unafraid to demand better or to walk out -- even as we cling to the people and places that we keep leaving and loving."
~Cassie Premo Steele, author of
Earth Joy Writing
"McQueen’s a working woman’s Maggie Estep, a salt-of-the-earth phrase hammerer that’s more mozzarella than camembert. Her ability to paint stanzas transfers the audience back in time with the effectiveness of a flux capacitor."
~David Travis Bland
Reporter, The State