Malachi Lily

Hyacinthus and The Daughter Of Babylon

Risograph print of mixed-media painting

“The Bible describes Babylon as the mother of whores and a witch. Inevitably, a fertility goddess. She helps me heal my sexual trauma and reclaim my sexuality. Hyacinthus is another sexual martyr, another lover, another endangered trans. Apollo, in play, threw a disc so hard at Hyacinthus that it struck him dead. From his blood grew the hyacinth flower—trans blood as a shapeshifter. The Daughter and Hyacinthus can never be destroyed by the gods who dared to touch them.”

— Malachi Lily

About the artist

Malachi Lily

American

Malachi Lily (they/them) is a black, Philly born/based shapeshifting agender storyteller, illustrator, and director. They graduated in 2017 as Valedictorian from the University of the Arts with a BFA in Creative Writing and a double major in Illustration. They received a revelatory education from the 2023 winter cohorts at Tin House and Roots. Wounds. Words. Lily was a Scholarship Fellow for the 2022 Writing in Color Retreat at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the first writing space in their life with only people of color, a life-changing experience with Mathangi Subramanian. In 2024 they have three residencies, Stoveworks, Queer Materials Lab, and the Chateau d’Orquevaux. Their latest achievements have been in writing, as that is the craft they’ve been focusing on developing the most these past two years. Before this time, their focus was on visual art. Present and future intentions are to combine visual art and writing as an illustrated novel and their first animated short film. Their visual work has been seen in Black Quantum Futurism, In These Times, 3311 Productions, Hachette Publishing, Vox Populi, The Baffler, Teros Gallery, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Autostraddle, Asian Arts Initiative, and Forward Together. Their writing has been published in the 2022 Pride Issue of The Tea and the 2022 Beyond Queer Words anthology. They were short-listed for Fractured Lit’s 2022 Ghost, Fable, and Fairytale prize. In 2018, Roxanne Gay declared their story “One Yellow. One Blue.” an honorable mention in the Literary Death Match, and they won the Editors Choice prize in 2017 for the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry.