Alabama State University will host a book reading and discussion today at 7 p.m. at the ASU John Garrick Hardy Student Center ballroom with Dr. Randall Horton, author and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, reading from his new novel, “Hook: A Memoir through Letters.”
Horton said his new book continues in the tradition of prison memoirs by Nathan McCall, Carl Upchurch and R. Dwayne Betts, but is the first to engage in direct communication between male and female, black and Latino.
“It also tells a story rarely seen in literature by and about black men,” Horton said. ‘Hook: A Memoir through Letters’ is framed by the letters between Lxxxx and myself and explores the situations leading us to incarceration as well as our thoughts on social/racial constructions, the human condition, and the prison industrial complex. Correlations between our lives are further revealed by flashbacks of my past.”
About Randall Horton
Horton is a recent recipient of the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a founding member of the poetry collective, The Symphony, with fellow prison memoirist Dwayne Betts (Random House). He has built a strong platform on incarceration through speaking engagements and lectures across the nation, including at Yale University and on NPR.
Horton also is a Cave Canem Fellow and author of three poetry collections:” Pitch Dark Anarchy” (Northwestern/Triquarterly Press, “The Definition of Place” (Main Street Rag’s Finalist and Editor’s Select), and “The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street” (Main Street Rag). He received a Ph.D. in creative writing from SUNY Albany and currently is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven.
Photo by Paula Martali
Posted By: Reginald Culpepper
Thursday, February 4th 2016 at 1:29PM
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