Faylita Hicks
Nonfiction
Chicago, IL
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx poet, Grammy-nominated recording artist, spirit-led creative strategist, and cultural theorist working at the intersection of social justice and spirituality. Born in Gardena, California and raised in Central Texas, Hicks is the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), winner of the 2025 Midwest Book Award and finalist for the 2024 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Their debut memoir, A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet, is forthcoming from Haymarket in 2027.
As founder of The Craft Career Studio™, Hicks offers spirit-centered coaching and creative career strategy for artists seeking to align their public work with their personal power. Their practice integrates astrology, tarot, quantum theory, and ritual into customized pathways for writers, performers, and visionaries. This unique approach is grounded in lived experience and bolstered by national recognition from the Art for Justice Fund, Ford Foundation, Illinois Humanities, Tin House, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Black Mountain Institute, and Lambda Literary. Hicks is the 2025 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow, a 2024 Gwendolyn Brooks Living Legacy Honoree, and a 2024 Chicago Reader Best Poet finalist.
Hicks’ creative reach spans music, performance, and visual art. They were featured on Antonio Vergara’s The Fury (2025), a Grammy-nominated contemporary blues album, and served as the solo actor in the national touring production of Your Healing Is Killing Me. Their choreopoem Bar for Bar was a 2025 finalist for Definition Theatre’s Amplify Series 5 in Chicago. In the visual arts, Hicks has been featured in the Ford Foundation’s No Justice Without Love exhibit, Collective Gestures at The Center for Art and Advocacy, and the 8 x 5 Billboard Project with Art at a Time Like This. Their debut solo exhibition, The Digital Archives of the Unseen: Poetry and Portraits from the Age of Censorship and Detention, will open at Walls Turned Sideways in January 2026 and run through May 2026.
Beyond their artmaking, Hicks is a committed cultural leader. They currently serve as Board Chair of the Guild Literary Complex (2024–2026), Core Faculty with StoryStudio (2025–2027), adjunct faculty with the University of Reno Low Residency MFA program (2022–present), and Alumni Consultant with the Center for Art and Advocacy (2023–2025). They are also a voting member of the Recording Academy, serving on the Membership Committee and the Songwriters & Composers Committee of the Chicago Chapter, and working as both a District Advocate and Grammy U Mentor.
Their writing and visual art appear widely in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Slate, Yale Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Slowdown Podcast, and more. Their op-eds supported Mano Amiga’s 2019–2020 campaign to reform citation-based policy in San Marcos, Texas. Their story has been featured in the PBS Independent Lens documentary 45 Days in a Texas Jail (2019) and in Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem (2021), narrated by Mahershala Ali.
Hicks lives and creates in Chicago, Illinois, where they continue to build a body of work committed to liberation, ritual, and the transformative power of art.