After the death of her fiancé, poet Faylita Hicks was arrested for a bounced $25 check written to a local grocery store. After spending 45 days in the Texas jail, the poet re-enters the world determined to never return—even if that means leaving some folx behind. Hicks’ prose debut, A BODY OF WILD LIGHT is a memoir-in-essays following the poet on their journey from the rowdy days of the 2000’s in the national poetry slam scene, to the Midwest placement of their child for adoption, and the 2019 campaign for the Cite-and- Release Ordinance with small but powerful nonprofit Mano Amiga in San Marcos, Texas, nearly a decade after Hicks’ arrest. A coming-of-age story that meditates on how a Black rural millennial experienced the rise of mass incarceration and its effects in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.