Saleem Hue Penny

Saleem Hue Penny (him/friend) is a Black, disabled poet expanding the pastoral tradition of the Southern Black Belt using a "rural hip-hop blues" aesthetic. He punctuates his hybrid/mixed media work with drum loops, gouache paint, Jim Crow artifacts, walnut ink, field sounds, & birch bark. Across poetic mediums, he explores how young people of color traverse wild spaces and define freedom on their own terms.

Saleem coordinates programs and partnerships at Zoeglossia, an emerging nonprofit organization supporting poets with disabilities. He is also an Assistant Poetry Editor at Bellevue Literary Review, a member of Obsidian’s Inaugural “O|Sessions Black Listening” 2022 cohort, and a proud Cave Canem Fellow. Awards include the winner of the Bellevue Literary Review 2021 Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry (selected by Jen Bervin) and runner-up for the Breakwater Review 2021 Peseroff Poetry Prize (selected by Chen Chen). Saleem has received residency support from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center.

A mutual aid advocate and disability justice activist, Saleem practices cultivating "Ecosystems of Care" centering "Melanistic Wonderment". Saleem regularly collaborates on community engagement activities, particularly for teen parent-headed families, long-term pediatric patients, and families affected by incarceration. His chapbook 'The Attic, The Basement, The Barn' (Tammy Journal, 2017) raised money for nonprofit organizations ConTextos Chicago Project and Chicago Books to Women in Prison. His 2020 album 'You Just (Try to) Keep On: Songs of Solidarity + Self-Care' raised funds for Market Box, a mutual aid food distribution collaborative. Bundled with crayons and snacks, his children's zine 'The People’s Grab-n-Go Coloring Book' was distributed to children at emergency meal sites in multiple Chicago food desserts. 

He is compiling his first full-length poetry collection and pursuing archival research for ‘The Happy Land Liniment’ Project: an oral history, digital field guide, and chapbook-length lyric essay set in Reconstruction-era “Affrilachia”. He is eternally grateful for his mother, Rosetta Olethea Harmon Penny (1957-2020), who taught him the power and potential of writing.