Award-winning poets Randall Horton and Jacqueline Jones LaMon to read at UAlbany, February 16, 2016

ALBANY, NY (02/03/2016)(readMedia)-- Randall Horton and Jacqueline Jones LaMon, award-winning poets, will read from recent work on Tuesday, February 16, 2016 at 7:00 p.m. in the University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building, on the University at Albany's uptown campus. Earlier that day at 4:15 p.m., the authors will present an informal seminar in the Standish Room, Science Library, 3rd Fl., on the uptown campus. Free and open to the public, the events are sponsored in conjunction with the UAlbany Art Museum exhibition Race, Love, and Labor.

Randall Horton, a UAlbany graduate, is the author of the poetry collections Pitch Dark Anarchy (2013), The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street (2009), and The Definition of Place (2006). His most recent publication is Hook: A Memoir (2015), which explores his downward spiral from student to drug addict, cocaine smuggler, and incarcerated felon. Upon release from prison Horton earned a Ph.D. in English at UAlbany. Crystal Wilkinson, author of Water Street praised Horton's memoir, describing it as "Intense, beautiful and deeply moving ... a commanding story about survival of the streets, survival of the self and the power of writing. I won't stop thinking about this book for a very long time."

Horton serves on the Board of Directors for Pen America's Pen Prison Writing Program and is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven. He is a Fellow for Cave Canem, America's leading Black poetry organization, committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets. Horton is also a senior editor at Willow Books, an independent literary press he helped found in 2006.

Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea González Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship. His creative and critical work have appeared in the print journals Callaloo, Sou'wester, Caduceus, and New Haven Review and in the online journal The Offending Adam.

Jacqueline Jones LaMon, president of Cave Canem, is the author of the poetry collection Gravity, U.S.A. (2006), and Last Seen (2011), which was inspired by actual case histories of long-term missing African American children. The provocative and heartrending collection of poems evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in contemporary America. The Bloomsbury Review stated, "The most disturbing poetics of loss is often the most valuable, beautiful, and lethal... LaMon is a master of the persona poem, where the voices of children, parents, abductors, and friends interact as each tale is revealed."

Of her earlier poetry collection, Gravity, USA, poet Kevin Young said, "With her debut, Jacqueline Jones LaMon graces us with a collection both introspective and out of body, her poems taking on the weight of the everyday world, and the extraordinary within it. [It] is not just a book filled with a subtle, sorrowful, and ultimately brazen power, but a place where you'll want to visit, and stay."

For additional information visit the New York State Writers Institute on Facebook, online at www.albany.edu-writers-inst, or call 518-442-5620.

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Posted Wednesday February 03, 2016 at 10:21 am by New York State Writers Institute
Last Updated Friday February 05, 2016 at 11:58 am