faylita hicks
Author of
A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet (Haymarket Books, 2025)
A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024)
HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019)
Faylita Hicks is the queer Afro-Latinx author of the forthcoming debut memoir A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet (Haymarket Books, 2025) and poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024). Their poetry debut HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019) was a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. A 2022 Art for Justice Fellow and the current Writer-in-Residence for the Texas After Violence Project, Hicks has received fellowships, residencies, and accolades from Black Mountain Institute, the Tony-award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Lambda Literary, Tin House, Right of Return USA, and several others. Their poetry, essays, spoken word, and digital art is forthcoming or has been featured in the American Poetry Review, Huffpost, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, Scalawag, Slate, The Slowdown, and Texas Observer, amongst others. Hicks is a current voting member of the Recording Academy.
Twitter / Instagram / Facebook / TikTok / www.faylitahicks.com
Books by Faylita
A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet (Haymarket Books, 2025)
A Body of Wild Light: The Fall and Rise of an American Poet is the spirit-drunk memoir of queer Black Latinx poet Faylita Hicks, whose series of poverty-driven arrests at the height of the 21st century’s social justice movement took them on an odyssey through North America’s criminal legal system. A former slam poet turned grass roots organizer, Hicks details the epic trek from the enflamed hoods of Los Angeles to the soothing waters of Port Antonio—an episodic journey made possible by their love of poetry—before serendipitously arriving at the footsteps of the San Marcos city council to change the very misdemeanor policy that almost ended their career. A lyric inquiry into the heart of legislation, and a testament to the limitless power of the written and spoken word, this memoir is a dive into the liminal spaces of law and order, poetry and prose, body and spirit, justice and injustice. Where the road meets the horizon, this is where readers find the poet—A Body of Wild Light.
A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024)
A Map of My Want explores the evolution of Hicks’ personal identity desire as politic, and the shifting dynamics of familial and romantic love using climate change and domestic migration as guiding principles.
HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019)
Hicks’s riveting debut HoodWitch is a reclamation of power for Black women and nonbinary people whose bodies have become the very weapons used against them.