Randall Horton

Randall Horton is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir, published by Augury Books/ Brooklyn Art Press. His previous work include the poetry collections The Definition of Place and The Lingua France of Ninth Street, both with Main Street Rag and Pitch Dark Anarchy (Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press). In addition, Randall has been interviewed on Fox News, NPR, CTNPR, CSPAN, the New Haven Register and countless journals, magazines and radio shows. He currently sits on the Advisory Board of Pen America’s Pen Prison Writing Program. 

In 2018-2019 Randall was selected as Poet-in-Residence for the Civil Rights Corps in Washington DC, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the American legal system. Randall has conducted workshops, lectured and toured numerous adult and juvenile detention centers across the nation to provide encouragement and hope for those entangled within the legal system. He is dedicated to eradicating the language of incarceration that tends to re-criminalize those entangled in the legal system. 

Additionally, Dr. Randall Horton is currently the only tenured Full Professor in the United States of America at a university or college with seven felony convictions. He is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature, and their latest musical project, The Baraka Sessions, was named best vocal jazz album by NPR in 2019. Randall’s latest collection of poetry, {#289-128}, will be published by the University of Kentucky Press in Fall 2020. Dr. Horton is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven.

Faylita Hicks

Faylita Hicks’s debut collection, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), has been named a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award, and work included has won Best of Net and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. The Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Hicks (she/her/they) is a queer Black writer and directly-impacted organizer working with the social justice organization Mano Amiga, examining the impact of pretrial incarceration and cash bail on low-income people in rural counties through poetry, hip hop, mobile photography, op-eds, and essays.

Born in Los Angeles, CA, Hicks is based in San Marcos, TX, and is the 2009 Grand Slam Champion of the Austin Poetry Slam, a member of the 2008 Neo Soul Poetry Slam Team and the winner of several spoken word competitions. 

Since 2013, she has been an artist on the roster for hip-hop collective Grid Squid Entertainment, releasing her first hip hop EP, Collision City, in 2015 and her third spoken word album, ONYX, in June 2019. She has toured both nationally and internationally as a solo act since 2007, performing in venues across 30+ states, as well as in Jamaica and Canada.

Also the founder and creative director of event production company Arrondi Creative Productions, Hicks was awarded the San Marcos Arts Commission Grant in 2017, for her monthly event series for emerging artists, SMTX Ripple Market, and a second grant for her Writers by the River Reading Series in 2019. They served as a mentor for the LA Review of Books 2019 Publishing Cohort, started the Speak Up Workshop series for justice-impacted people in Hays County, and recently joined the Statewide Leadership Council with the Texas Fair Defense Project in early 2020.

Recently, Hicks was awarded fellowships and residencies from Right of Return USA, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the 2020 Tin House Winter Workshop. They were a finalist for several annual awards, including the Palette Poetry Spotlight Award, the Cosmonauts Avenue Annual Poetry Prize, and the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship.

In December 2019, their pretrial incarceration story was featured in PBS’s Independent Lens Documentary Series and will be included in a new Brave New Films project. Their poetry, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and reviews of their work have been published in, or are forthcoming in, Adroit, Bustle, The Cincinnati Review, Huffington Post, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, Slate Magazine, the Southern Review of Books, Texas Monthly, and the Texas Observer, among others. Hicks received her BA in English from Texas State University-San Marcos and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University.

Jared Owens

Jared Owens (Summerville, SC) is a visual artist and a New York native. Owens’ art career began as a self-taught portrait artist in Federal Prison. Because of the monotony of portraiture, Owens turned to the less confined, organic nature of abstract art. His work often combines reclaimed materials with traditional mediums — such as oil, acrylic, wood carving and ceramics — focusing on dismantling the idea that that which society disregards can never have worth.

“My art is a result of my prison experience, being confined in a 54 acre space for over a decade and navigating the ‘politics of art making within a carceral archipelago.’ Federal prison made me aware of the power of art within a confined system and all of the challenges and difficulties one is presented with in the pursuit of freedom of expression. Through my art I wish to confront the viewer with the reality that they too have a hand in the creation, and therefore destruction, of carceral constructs and all its sub-systems. I want the viewer to be aware of this power, and wish to present art that challenges the current state of ‘cognitive dissonance’ that society as a whole suffers from, until we reach a place where caging humans is no longer seen as the first solution.”

Owen’s work has been featured in the exhibition “Marking Time: Prison Arts and Activism” at Rutgers University, and HBO’s “OG Experience,” in Chelsea, NY. He has completed site-specific installations at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site and is currently working on a public art project with the Philadelphia Mural Arts program. His work will be included in the upcoming exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” at MoMA PS1 and “Rendering Justice,” at the African American Museum of Philadelphia in 2020.