As part of the closing celebration for the exhibition Leilah Babirye: We Have a History, join us for an afternoon of poetry woven through the arts of Africa gallery. Poets will give voice to Babirye’s sculptures — works that hold queerness, exile, kinship, beauty, and belonging with fierce tenderness. This program offers an intimate activation of the gallery, where the voices of poets meet Babirye’s artistic forms in real time.

About the poets

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx poet, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural architect whose work moves across text, installation, sound, and ritual at the intersection of the sacred and the political. She was a principal performer in the national touring production Your Healing Is Killing Me, featured at the 2024 Encuentro National Theatre Festival. Her debut solo exhibition is currently on view at Walls Turned Sideways gallery in Chicago, where she also serves as board chair of the Guild Literary Complex. She is the author of A Map of My Want (2024) and HoodWitch (2019).

Brittany Rogers is an artist, educator, and lifelong Detroiter. She is editor-in-chief of Muzzle magazine, VS podcast cohost, and author of Good Dress (2024), a finalist for the NAACP Image Award and Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. A Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award recipient and Kresge Arts Fellow, Rogers is a Black queer femme whose poetry uses beauty and adornment as a lens to center Black femmes. Her poetry explores audacity, intimacy, grief, ownership, matrilineage, desire, and autonomy while also interrogating how classicism, respectability politics, and anti-Blackness complicate societies engagement with these themes.