Faylita Hicks
About
Faylita Hicks is a multi-genre writer, interdisciplinary artist, Hoodoo practitioner, activist, and cultural strategist whose work examines grief, erotic mysticism, quantum theory, and abolitionist futures.
She is the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), a 2024 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Award shortlist finalist, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry shortlist finalist, and the debut memoir-in-essays A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet (Haymarket, 2027). She is a 2025 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow, a 2024 Gwendolyn Brooks Living Legacy Honoree, a 2024 Chicago Reader’s Best Poet shortlist finalist, a 2023 Illinois Humanity’s Envisioning Justice Awardee, a 2022 Art for Justice Fund Awardee, the winner of the 2021 Sappho Poetry Award, the 2021Best of Net Prize for Poetry, and others.
She is the solo performer in the nationally touring theatre production of Your Healing Is Killing Me (2023-current), and was a featured spoken word recording artist on a Grammy-nominated album in 2024.
Hicks holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Reno and has had her work supported by UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, the Tony-award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, the Center for Art and Advocacy, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and others. She currently serves as Chair of the Board for Chicago-based nonprofit The Guild Literary Complex, Core Faculty in Poetry with StoryStudio, adjunct faculty with the University of Reno’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Incline Village, and voting member of the Recording Academy.
You can find her poetry, essays, and art in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, and Yale Review amongst others. Her text-based art has been featured in exhibits such as the Center for Art and Advocacy’s Collective Gestures: Building Community through Practice (2025) in Brooklyn, Ford Foundation’s No Justice Without Love Group Exhibit (2023) in New York, and Art At A Time Like This and Save Art Spaces 8 x 5 Billboard exhibits in Miami and Houston (2023, 2024), and more.
Her personal account of her time in pretrial incarceration in Hays County is featured in the ITVS Independent Lens 2019 documentary 45 Days in a Texas Jail, and Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem (Brave New Films, 2021).
Faylita currently lives, dreams, and creates in Chicago, Illinois.
Photo credit: Carmendy L. Hicks-Tuggle.
