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Faylita Hicks

Faylita Hicks (born 1985) is an American poet and the author of the poetry collections HoodWitch (2019) and A Map of My Want (2024). HoodWitch was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. A Map of My Want won the 2025 Midwest Book Award (General Poetry).

Life and career

Hicks was born in California and raised in Texas. They teach in the low-residency creative writing MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno, serve as core faculty in poetry at StoryStudio Chicago, and were a 2021 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Hicks was also featured in the 2019 ITVS/PBS documentary 45 Days in a Texas Jail.

HoodWitch (poetry collection)

Hicks's debut collection HoodWitch received attention from literary critics. In RHINO, Emily Pérez described the book as a strong debut and emphasized how it combines Haitian Vodou, personal trauma, and public violence through the figure of "Gawd". In The Rupture, Deborah Bacharach read the collection as a work of spiritual action. In an essay in West Branch that considered HoodWitch alongside other books, the collection was described as reclaiming witchcraft as a Black diasporic and feminist source of authority and, "at its core," as a book of "protection spells for girls".

Bibliography

Poetry

Awards and honors

  • 2025 Writing Freedom Fellowship, awarded by Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation.
  • 2025 Midwest Book Award (General Poetry), for A Map of My Want.
  • 2025 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award (Poetry), for A Map of My Want.
  • Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry (finalist, 2020), for HoodWitch.
  • 2020 Sappho Prize (Palette Poetry), first place, for the poem “I Tried Dating Again.”

References