Faylita Hicks is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Julie Suk Award. The former Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, they currently serve as the 2021 Poet-in-Residence for Civil Rights Corps and are the fall 2021 Shearing Fellow for Black Mountain Institute. In June 2021, they became a voting member of the Recording Academy/Grammys as a spoken word artist.
Hicks is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Broadway Advocacy Coalition, The Dots Between, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and the Right of Return USA. They were a finalist for the 2021 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, the 2021 and 2018 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, and the 2019 Creative Capital Award.
Their work has been featured in or is forthcoming in Adroit, American Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Slate, Texas Observer, Yale Review, amongst others. Their poetry is anthologized in The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, What Tells You Ripeness: Black Writing on Nature, and When There Are Nine.
Their personal account of their time in pretrial incarceration in Hays County is featured in the ITVS Independent Lens 2019 documentary, “45 Days in a Texas Jail,” and the Brave New Films 2021 documentary narrated by Mahershala Ali, “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem.”
Hicks received a BA in English from Texas State University-San Marcos and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University.