On September 9 from 6-7:30 p.m. Dr. Randall Horton will give a reading from his memoir Dead Weight as well as other works. He is here pursuant to the Mellon Humanities for All Times grant to support approaches to questions of the carceral state, prisons, and the criminal legal system.

Dr. Horton is an Associate Professor of English at University of New Haven as well as a poet and award-winning multi-genre artist. In 2018-2019 he was Poet-In-Residence for the Civil Rights Corps in Washington D.C. and in 2020 he received a Right to Return Fellowship to creatively address issues of mass incarceration and racial injustice while advancing campaigns for change. He has also co-founded a nonprofit, Radical Reversal, which builds media spaces in carceral settings. Horton is the only tenured professor teaching English in the U.S. with 7 felony convictions. The title of his reading is "Language Matter(s) Within the Carceral State."