2025 CWA Book of the Year
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2025 Midwest Book Award Winner
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2024 Chicago Review of Books Award Finalist
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Chicago Reader's Best of 2024 Finalist
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2025 CWA Book of the Year 〰️ 2025 Midwest Book Award Winner 〰️ 2024 Chicago Review of Books Award Finalist 〰️ Chicago Reader's Best of 2024 Finalist 〰️
A MAP OF MY WANT
POETRY | HAYMARKET BOOKS | July 9, 2024
From the critically acclaimed author of HoodWitch, Faylita Hicks’s second collection explores the question, Where do our desires take us? #BestOfNet #PalettePoetrySapphoAward #PushcartPrizeNom
Haymarket Books | Bookshop | Powell’s | Pilsen Community Books
January 30th, 2026 – May 24th, 2026
Through deconstructed VHS tapes inscribed with poetry and collage portraits of directly impacted people, Faylita Hicks transforms discarded media into testimony. This installation resists erasure, confronting censorship, migrant detention, and mass incarceration while insisting on the enduring presence of those the state seeks to silence.
This debut solo exhibition by Hicks unspools memory, testimony, and resistance from the fragile material of VHS tape. Each strand, once a vessel of recorded surveillance and entertainment, is reimagined as a surface for poetry—lines etched into magnetic ribbon like incantations against disappearance. Alongside these sculptural interventions, Hicks presents original collage portraits of people directly impacted by censorship, migrant detention, and mass incarceration. Together, the works transform discarded technology and fragmented images into an active archive—one that documents the unseen, the silenced, and the deliberately erased. By weaving together poetry, portraiture, and sculptural form, Hicks makes visible the lives and stories too often reduced to data or forgotten in official records. In an age defined by detention and censorship, this exhibition insists on remembering, imagining, and witnessing otherwise.
the digital archives of the unseen
Poetry and portraits from the age of censorship and detention
FAYLITA HICKS
FAYLITA HICKS (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary Afro-Latinx artist working at the crossroads of social justice and spirituality, where creative endeavors become a catalyst for significant change and profound connection within the community.