"Language taught me to be a better human being. It taught me to understand what morality was."
Poet Randall Horton joins the podcast. The only tenured professor in the Unites States (University of New Haven) with seven felony convictions, he and Daniel have an open and frank conversation about his unique life, his path to the written word, and his emotional and physical redemption through writing. What began with a clear plastic pen and a yellow legal pad, while in Montgomery County Prison in Maryland, became a new life. What can words do? What do words and music have to do with one another? Can words "save?" This is a fascinating conversation with a singular American voice.
Randall Horton is the author of the poetry collections Pitch Dark Anarchy (Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2013), The Definition of Place (Main Street Rag, 2010), and The Lingua France of Ninth Street (Main Street Rag, 2009). His honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir(Augury Books, 2015). Horton is an associate professor of English at the University of New Haven. He is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders which recently received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he now resides in East Harlem.