Denison: Writers Charles Boyer and Randall Horton

Denison’s Beck Series welcomes Great Lake’s College Association (GLCA) prize winners Charles Boyer and Randall Horton. Boyer, GLCA Fiction Prize Winner, has received writing grants and fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University, and has taught the Journal Writing Seminar at Montserrat’s summer program in Viterbo, Italy, since 1998. His chapbook of poetry, “The Mockingbird Puzzle,” is published by Finishing Line Press. “History’s Child,” his first novel, tells the coming-of-age story of a Polish boy born in a village in eastern Poland in 1931, whose childhood is torn apart, first by the Soviet invasion from the east, then by the German invasion from the west, and ultimately by repressive grip of Stalin that sends him to the gulag and subsumes his homeland into the Soviet republic of Belarus. Horton, GLCA Nonfiction Prize Winner, is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. His previous work includes the poetry collection “Pitch Dark Anarchy.” Horton serves on the Board of Directors for Pen America’s Pen Prison Writing Program and teaches at the University of New Haven. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, and a member of both the Affrilachian Poets and the experimental performance group Heroes are Gang Leaders. Horton is also a senior editor at Willow Books, an independent literary press he helped found in 2006. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he now resides in Harlem, New York. His GLCA award winning book, “Hook: A Memoir,” explores his downward spiral from unassuming Howard University undergraduate to homeless drug addict, international cocaine smuggler, and incarcerated felon. Hook explores race and social construction in America, the forgotten lives within the prison industrial complex, and the resilience of the human spirit.