GOLDEN (they/them) is a Black gender-nonconforming trans photographer, poet, & community organizer raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts (Massachusett people land). They are the author of the Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books) and the award winning photographic self-portraiture series On Learning How to Live, documenting Black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States. 

Their forthcoming hybrid poetry & photography book REPRISE will be released in 2025 with Haymarket Books.

Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), a Best of the Net Award (2020), a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-2021), a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography (2021), a Women Photograph Project Grant (2021), a Collective Futures Fund Grant (2022), an Aperture/Google Creator Labs Photo Fund Grant (2023), and the Queer|Art Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2023). 

They hold a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University.