LITERARY WRITER

CHELSEA
TAYRIEN HICKS

Chelsea Tayrien Hicks is a writer. She has lived in San Francisco, Pawhuska, and Hampton Roads, where she grew up in diaspora from the Wazhazhe people. Her first book, A Calm & Normal Heart, from Unnamed Press was published in 2022. She is at work on a poetry collection in Wahzhazhe ie with support from the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation. Her writing has been published in McSweeney’s, Yellow Medicine Review, the LA Review of Books, Indian Country Today, the Believer, The Audacity, The Paris Review, and shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Manetti Shrem Museum.

In 2017, she received an MA from the University of California, Davis, and became involved in California Wazhazhe groups. She also earned an MFA in the Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she now teaches creative writing. Her advocacy work has included heritage language creative writing and revitalization workshops. The Ford Foundation awarded her a 2021 honorable mention for the promotion of Indigenous language in creative writing. In 2022, she organized an Indigenous language creative writing workshop called Words of the People hosted here in Tulsa.