Featured Readers
FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Born in South Central California and raised in Central Texas, they use their intersectional experiences to advocate for the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. The former Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, they are a voting member of the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs. Hicks is also the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Art for Justice Fund, Black Mountain Institute, the Tony-Award winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, The Dots Between, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Lambda Literary, Texas After Violence Project, Tin House, and the Right of Return USA. Their poetry, essays, and digital art have been published in or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poetry, Slate, Texas Observer, and Yale Review, amongst others. 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.
HILA RATZABI‘s poetry has been published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, The Normal School, About Place, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She is the author of “There are Still Woods,” forthcoming on June Road Press, and the chapbook “The Apparatus of Visible Things.” The recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Willapa Bay AiR and the Crater Lake National Park residencies, she also served as editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Storyscape Literary Journal and holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently the director of virtual content and programs at Ritualwell.org and lives in Oak Park, Illinois, with her partner and two children.