Randall Horton is a writer, poet, artist, and professor of English at the University of New Haven. He is the only person in the United States with seven felony convictions and academic tenure. Horton is the recipient of the 2022 Creative Capital Award, the American Book Award for Oral Literature, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir, a Poet-in-Residence at the Civil Right Corpse, and a Soze Foundation Right to Return Fellow. His poetry collection {#289-128} was published by the University of Kentucky Press, and Dead Weight: A Memoir was published by Northwestern University Press in 2021. Horton is on the Advisory Board of Pen America’s Pen Prison Writing Program. He is also co-founder of the social justice band, Radical Reversal and a member of the band Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a group whose unique blend of blues, jazz, funk, hip hop, go-go, R&B, soul, classical music, poetry, dramaturgy, and prose continues the legacy of Amiri Baraka. He has appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, CTNPR, and in countless journals, magazines, and radio shows.