Image Credit: Tracey Brown of Papercamera Photography
In downtown Baltimore, Rachel Hicks is working to be a good neighbor and to contribute to the revival of the Christian imagination. One of her tools is poetry.
“Poetry was always … like a heart language for me,” she said. “I wrote all the way through high school and college, but I never considered poetry as a vocation. I didn’t really think that normal people like me could do that as a vocation.”
A prolific reader whose interest in writing began as a child, Hicks was particularly compelled by poetry.
After college, she worked as an English teacher. When her first child was born, Hicks decided to stay home and, with her husband’s encouragement, more seriously pursue writing. She soon discovered that developing as a writer and getting published would require considerable time and effort, but eventually that work began to pay off. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been published both in Christian literary journals — like Ekstasis, Presence, and The Windhover — and in secular journals such as The Baltimore Review and The Briar Cliff Review.
Her first collection of poetry, “Accumulated Lessons in Displacement,” was published by Wipf and Stock in 2025.
Over the past decade, Hicks has experienced what she calls a “renaissance” as a Christian writer. Growing up, she learned about knowing and loving Christ, she said, but she did not receive much “depth of catechesis” in Christian history or instruction about how art and literature have blessed the Church and can continue to do so. She said the American evangelical tradition has not cultivated an appreciation for the arts the way other Christian traditions have.
Over the past 10 years, she has read and connected with other Christian writers and participated in conferences and events focused on Christian art and literature. And she believes a growing number of orthodox Christians are willing to learn from and dialog with other Christian traditions that take the arts more seriously.
“I feel like I’m starting to be able to pull from an inheritance that I felt disinherited from for a long time because I didn’t know it was there,” Hicks said.
Hicks has begun to contribute to the conversation, too. In addition to her work as assistant editor at Mars Hill Audio, a Christian organization that curates and publishes audio resources regarding faith and culture, she hosts a monthly “salon” in the vein of literary and artistic salons of earlier centuries. At Hicks’ home, Christians interested in theology, culture, the arts, and philosophy gather monthly to discuss “deeper and bigger questions,” she said. Hicks’ guests come from different theological traditions and vocations, including theology professors, stay-at-home moms, physicists, poets, and students.
In contributing to a Christian literary resurgence, Hicks’ work is rooted in her local community. Throughout her life she has considered what it means to do good work in very different local environments. Because her parents worked in international school education, Hicks has lived all over the world: born in India, she moved to Pakistan around age 3, then to Jordan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, and finally back to India — all before graduating high school. She moved to the United States for college, where she met her husband.
In 2006, Hicks and her husband moved to China, where they lived for seven years working with the Christian relief organization Food for the Hungry. It was in China that, while ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of others, Hicks’ writing began to bloom as she read more contemporary Christian poets and planned her own scheduled writing times.
After ministry in China, Hicks and her husband returned to the U.S. with a strong desire to minister wherever God placed them. They have lived in the Baltimore area for almost 14 years, attending PCA churches and pouring themselves into local work with immigrants, refugees, and other needy people in their area.
According to Hicks, the keywords “small, human, slow, local” infuse both her writing and editing work along with her family’s approach to life. In her poem “Instauration,” Hicks asks whether there is a liturgy for
… saying no to it all:
deleting accounts, materializing back
into the flesh of life—present and almost whole?
Or one for naming the chest’s weight, the brain’s vapor?
Is there a path that leads back to silence?
Hicks said that she and her husband are trying hard “to focus on loving people in our physical lives and being physically present in those lives… Christians especially being together and being the body of Christ face to face with each other — I feel like that’s what’s most needed in a disembodied, fractured world of non-reality right now.”
“Accumulated Lessons in Displacement” dwells on the concept of exile and a fractured world. Because of her background, Hicks believes she can “relate to people who are on the move.” She experienced, for example, a forced evacuation while living in Congo. In her poem “The Exile Speaks of Mountains,” she writes that “only if I embrace this life / as a perpetual pilgrim do I find solace in remembering.”
The book represents much of Hicks’ poetry from the past decade — poems that deal with physical displacement, spiritual alienation, suffering, and joy.
“My original thought was that it would all be related to international living and my experiences, but it’s a lot more than that and, I think, goes a lot deeper than just that,” Hicks said.
She hopes “Accumulated Lessons in Displacement” will ring true even with readers who are not naturally drawn to poetry.
“I want to write poetry that’s good in craft but also that people can just love and resonate with in some way,” she said.
And, according to the reports Hicks has received from readers who don’t usually enjoy poetry, her book has thus far succeeded on that front.
Currently, Hicks is working toward another poetry collection, revisiting a novel that has been in-progress for 18 years, and writing occasional short fiction and essays. She hopes to begin a Master of Fine Arts program once her daughter completes college.
In both her writing and her everyday life, Hicks — as she writes in her poem “Melancholy” — is “Always looking back to Eden, forward/ to the city with trees – the ones with/ golden leaves for our healing.”