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. Punctuating his hybrid work with construction scraps, drum loops, Jim Crow artifacts, and birch bark, Saleem explores how young people of color traverse wild spaces and define freedom on their own terms.

Saleem’s art and advocacy are inseparable. He is a proud Cave Canem Fellow, 2024 Disability Futures Fellow, and a member of O|Sessions Black Listening cohort. Saleem was an inaugural PeoplesHub Social Justice Artist-in-Residence and a 2021 Poetry Coalition Fellow. A board member at Ecosystems of Care, a parenting mentor at ConTextos, and a founding worker-owner of Cooperation Racine, L.W.C.A in Englewood, Chicago, Saleem’s work is rooted in Disability Justice. He is an assistant poetry editor at Bellevue Literary Review and has received support from Hurston/Wright Writers Week Worksop, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.

Saleem is developing TRKLDWN, an interactive poetics informed by 1980s means-testing, centered around the “Application for Access to Entitlement Words.” He 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.”