On June 12th, 2015, the Murphy Institute Blog Arts & Culture Editors hosted the first ever Creative Arts Night at the Murphy Institute.
In this video clip, Dr. Randall Horton, Assistant Professor of New Haven College of Arts and Science, explores how his writing life as a poet began during his commuted sentence in North Carolina correctional facility. This talk was part of the Creative Arts panel event in June 2015 at the Murphy Institute.
In tracing his creative and academic path, Horton demonstrates the connections between the creative arts, sociopolitical consciousness and grassroots organizing. He shows how writing programs such as the Cave Canem and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop can serve as alternatives to institutional fine arts programs that are inaccessible to many writers in underserved communities. In providing mentoring and workshop space, these organizations offer much-needed creative instruction and facilitate counter-perspectives to the production emerging from BFA and MFA programs.
Horton recounts being mentored by Toi Derricote and Cornelius Eady, the founders of Cave Canem, an African-American writers’ collective expressly formed to support and nurture writers of African descent. Since then, Horton has been involved in several vital poetry projects. They include the Affrilachian Poets, a network of writers linked by Nikki Finney and Frank Walker who identify themselves as poets of African descent from the Appalachian region of the United States.
Horton also reads and teaches workshops to young poets in our nationwide juvenile detention system in the reading collective “The Symphony: The House that Etheridge Built” with Reginald Dwayne Betts. The organization’s name honors the influential poet Etheridge Knight. Read more about Horton here.
The three pieces that are read as part of his presentation are the poems ” Ars Poetica: A Black Man’s Primer”, “Art Meditation at Columbus Isle, San Salvador”, and a section from his upcoming memoir Hook. See more of Randall Horton’s work here and here.
