Current Editorial Team
Faylita Hicks is a queer nonbinary femme Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. They use their direct experience with pre-trial detention to advocate for the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people forced into poverty-based incarceration and subjected to racially-charged police disruptions to their lives.
They are the Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly digital anthology Black Femme Collective, the former EIC of the literary journal Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, a voting member of the Recording Academy, a 2020-2022 Texas Touring Artist, and the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Julie Suk Award. They are the winner of Palette Poetry’s 2020 Sappho Prize and have been awarded fellowships and residencies from 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, the first fellowship designed exclusively for previously incarcerated artists.
Their work is anthologized in The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, What Tells You Ripeness: Black Writing on Nature (Pangyrus, 2021), and When There Are Nine. Their other work has been featured in American Poetry Review, HuffPost, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Slate, Texas Monthly, andYale Review, amongst others. Their digital art has been shown in juried exhibitions at Texas State University’s Gallery of the Common Experience and Insomnia Gallery in Houston, as well as being featured in the print magazines of Five:2:One and Ecotone. In May 2021, they debuted Bar for Bar: After Party, their docu-poem about a world without police developed as part of their fellowships with Broadway Advocacy Coalition, followed by the release their fifth independent spoken word album A NAME FOR MY LOVE in September 2021 with the support of Civil Rights Corps.
They are a member of the Statewide Leadership Council, established by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, and Detention Watch Network, both of whom advocate for policy changes related to pretrial incarceration in rural counties, immigrant detention, and the use of cash bail in rural Texas counties. As an organizer with Mano Amiga, they helped to successfully advocate for the “Cite and Release” Ordinance in the city of San Marcos, in 2020. This legislation, which limits police discretion and lowers the potential for escalation, is the first of its kind in the state of Texas. Their incarceration story was featured in PBS’s Independent Lens Documentary Series “45 Days,” and is featured in “Racially Charged,” a new Brave New Films project released February 2021 and narrated by Mahershala Ali.
Hicks received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University.
Past Editors-In-Chief
Nicole Shawan Junior is a counter-storyteller who was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of beautiful inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. Her work appears in The Rumpus, SLICE Magazine, Kweli Journal, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, ZORA, Gay Mag, The Feminist Wire, PEN America’s Handbook for Writers in Prison (Haymarket 2021), Emerge (Lambda Literary 2020), and elsewhere. Nicole has received residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, PERIPLUS, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lambda Literary, RADAR Productions and the San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, and more. Her work has received support from Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council, Hurston/Wright Writers Week, Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA Summer Workshop, NeON Arts of Carnegie Hall, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and others. Nicole is the founder of Roots. Wounds. Words. (a literary arts revolution that serves BIPOC storytellers). Nicole has served on the editorial teams of Slice Magazine, Women’s Studies Quarterly of The Feminist Press, Raising Mothers,Sundress Publications, and has guest edited for The Rumpus. Nicole is currently working on her memoir, Cracked Concrete: A Memoir of Crackheads, Cousins & Crime.
Past Editorial Fellows
Taneasha White is a Black, Queer lover of words, inquisition, and community. She has used her role within both literary and organizational spaces to make room for folks who are often cast aside. Taneasha is a writer, sensitivity reader, and is the founding editor of UnSung Literary Magazine, a flash fiction and poetry publication focused on offering artistic space for marginalized voices. You can find pieces of Taneasha’s right here in the Black Femme Collective, as well as Prism, Asparagus Magazine, Well + Good, Black Youth Project, them., and more.
Starr Davis is a poet, essayist, and professional writer whose work has been featured in multiple literary magazines such as Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, So to Speak Journal, and Transition Magazine. She is the Creative Nonfiction Editor for TriQuarterly Magazine and Editorial Fellow for Black Femme Collective. She lives in Ohio, where she is working on her memoir, HUSSLE.