Saleem Hue Penny

Hybrid Poet

he/him/friend

Chicago, IL

Saleem, a Black man with a partially paralyzed face, an ever-widening smile, and a handlebar mustache, faces the camera. He wears clear-framed glasses, a plastic moisture chamber over his right eye, and a right-sided cochlear implant and sits comfortably hunched over a table with arms loosely folded. He wears a white T-shirt with “Blk joy” printed inside a red square and a pink and yellow floral-print bandana around his neck. Two pamphlet-style books created in first and second grade are on the table.

Saleem Hue Penny is a Black disabled poet expanding the pastoral tradition of the Southern Black Belt using a “rural hip-hop blues” aesthetic. Punctuating his hybrid work with construction scraps, drum loops, Jim Crow artifacts, and birch bark, Penny explores how young people of color traverse wild spaces and define freedom on their own terms. His art and advocacy are inseparable, and his work is rooted in Disability Justice. He is a proud Cave Canem Fellow, O|Sessions 1.0 Black Listening Inaugural Fellow, and PeoplesHub Social Justice Artist-in-Residence. A board member at Ecosystems of Care, a parenting mentor at ConTextos, and a founding worker-owner of Cooperation Racine LCWA in Englewood, Chicago, Penny is also an assistant poetry editor at Bellevue Literary Review and has received support from Hurston/Wright Writers Week Workshops, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. He is developing TRKLDWN, an interactive poetics informed by 1980s means-testing, centered around the ‘Application for Access to Entitlement Words.’ Penny is also pursuing archival research for The Happy Land Liniment Project, an oral history, digital field guide, and speculative lyric essays set in Reconstruction-era “Affrilachia.”