Golden (they/them) is a poet, photographer, installation artist, and educator raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry (2023), and Reprise (Haymarket Books, 2025). Golden’s award-winning photographic series On Learning How to Live, featured in Reprise, was long-listed for the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2021) and selected as a finalist for the Arnold Newman Prize (2021).
Their work can be found in The Boston Globe, Best of the Net Anthology, Button Poetry, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Vogue, The Washington Post, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Golden holds a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University and is currently a Nancy Craig Blackburn ’71 Fellow at Randolph College.
Image Description: A self-portrait of Golden, a gender non-conforming Black poet, from the chest up, standing in front of a green velvet curtain. Golden wears a black NY hat with white stripes down the crown of the hat and a white brim. Small sections of their white and black durag can be seen on the sides of their head. Golden also wears a salmon sleeveless athletic top that reads “Les Frans” across their chest. A metallic silver beaded necklace with a large letter G in the center, covers the collar of their shirt. Tan vertical lines can be seen in the center top and bottom of the shirt, cut off by the edge of the image.