Originally from Birmingham, AL, Randall Horton now resides in Harlem, NY. Randall is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award and, most recently, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Randall is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a member of The Symphony: The House that Etheridge Built. Randall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven. Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press is the publisher of his latest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy, which was published in 2013. Augury Books will publish his memoir, Hook, in fall of 2015.

Randall is also a member of the band: Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a group whose unique blend of blues, jazz, funk, hip hop, go-go, R&B, soul, classical music, poetry, dramaturgy and prose, continues the legacy of Amiri Baraka.

Randall has edited one anthology: Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose and HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. He is the editor of several literary journals and is the senior editor at Willow Books, an independent literary press he helped start in 2006. He has edited scores of poetry books and been involved in the development of many first time authors. Most recently, Randall edited Julianne Malveaux’s Striving and Striving: 365 Facts in Black Economic History, which received a NAACP Image Award Nomination in Nonfiction Literature.

In addition, Randall has been interviewed on NPR, CTNPR, the New Haven Register and countless online journals, magazines and radio shows. He is also on the Board of Directors of Pen America’s Pen Prison Writing Program.