Poet Randall Horton Joins the MFA in Writing Faculty
Poet Randall Horton will join the faculty of the Spalding University brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program as a guest during the program’s Fall 2011 residency, November 11-20. During the ten-day residency, he will co-lead a poetry workshop for MFA students, participate on a panel on the topic of ekphrastic poetry with other faculty members, and give a 10-minute reading during a session of faculty readings. The faculty reading session is open to the public; time, date and location will be announced in October and posted on the Spalding MFA website, /mfa.
As a guest faculty member, Mr. Horton will also deliver a lecture titled “Cultural Memory and The Black Radical Tradition,” exploring a poetics that operates from a position of blackness or the black radical tradition. Using Derrida’s critique of différance and difference and his concept of trace, this lecture will demonstrate how language can resist the dominant narrative of life and literature through the play of language. In the course of this exploration, Mr. Horton will explicate the solo improvisations of Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in the song Monin. The lecture is open to enrolled Spalding MFA students.
Randall Horton has an MFA in Poetry from Chicago State University and a Ph.D. in creative writing from SUNY Albany. He is assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven. He is the author of two collections of poems: The Definition of Place and The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, both from Main Street Rag. He 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. His creative and critical work has appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and The Packingtown Review. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and a member of The Symphony: The House that Etheridge Built.
Spalding University’s four-semester, brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program combines superb instruction with unparalleled flexibility and offers studies in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, screenwriting, and playwriting. At the beginning of each semester, students and faculty study together at a 10-day residency in Louisville or abroad, after which students return home to work with their expert mentors in guided independent study that provides an intense, individually tailored approach and one-on-one instruction.
Spalding University was established in 1814 and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The MFA Program is a member of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). The MFA program began in 2001 and has 363 alumni and 155 students. Its students and alums have published or produced more than 200 books/plays/films.
For more information about the Fall 2011 residency or the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program, please email mfa@spalding.edu, call (800) 896-8941, ext 4400, or visit /mfa.
