By Benjamin Frandsen
CHOWCHILLA, CA – Dr. Randall Horton, Ph.D., the nation’s only fully tenured professor of English that possesses seven felonies, left prison more than two decades ago.
As the co-founder of Radical Reversal, he oversees the building of media spaces inside carceral settings that deliver audio and music tools to residents at the intersection of literature.
Horton has since won two American Book Awards for his written and spoken poetry, published an award-winning memoir and claimed multiple literary fellowships while serving as a mentor and prison reform advocate seeking to empower incarcerated creators with the agency he was denied while confined.
Horton’s Radical Reversal podcast airs on the University of New Haven’s campus radio station WNHU at 88.7FM with departmental Dean support, featuring incarcerated poets that perform from within various Radical Reversal satellite studios installed inside carceral state facilities around the country.
For the first time, he’s inviting creators confined in California to occupy a recurring production role to co-produce and conduct interview journalism encounters with noteworthy guests who have agreed to engage incarcerated residents on issues of art, literature, and media at the intersection of racial equity and social justice.
Horton said, “I’ve chosen to work with the creators of Barz Behind Bars in California, because they aren’t just capable poets and artists, college students and mentors in the literacy space, but because, while being all those things, they are community builders and legitimate thought leaders who are driving the very conversation we all need to be having concerning the manner in which the place they still call prison acts with humanity as it permits resident’s creative agency to blossom.”
In 2022, Horton, who serves as a Freedom Reads Literary Ambassador, along with American Book Award poet and Freedom Reads founder Reginald Dwayne Betts, agreed to participate in a virtual interview conducted by Ghostwrite Mike and The Mundo Press, the incarcerated creators and facilitators of the Barz Behind Bars (B³) poetry workshop at Valley State Prison.
Horton noted, “These guys built a grassroots community of poets three years before they ever reached out to Dwayne, who went to California, met them and then introduced them to me. They are the community we serve.”
Describing how the virtual interview collaboration came about, Horton said “it was their idea, without any help from us at all, and they got themselves published in Columbia’s MFA annual, a legit Ivy League literary magazine, in a novel interview journalism content category the Exchange editors had never even published before, occupying precisely the kind of literary space Dwayne espoused in an interview for PJPxInside earlier that same year and that we have each jointly advocated forever.”
“We study the difference between rap and the high bar work of elevated MFA society poetry, and we’re giving voice to a future we hope to inhabit and that we haven’t heard any other creators in confinement articulate yet. We’re not on anybody else’s blueprint here,” Ghost said.
By all accounts, Ghost and Mundo are light years ahead of the country in this area, and ideally situated at Valley State Prison to do something nobody on the inside has ever done before, fusing poetry, music and journalism in the podcast, audio book and publishing space.
Film producer, Anti-Recidivism Coalition founder, and prison reform advocate Scott Budnick, Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian Heather Ann Thompson, Stanford Professor and poet A. Van Jordan, and Wesleyan Professor and poet John Murillo have each agreed to participate in interviews with the duo for “Lifer Cypher,” the proposed segment within Horton’s Radical Reversal podcast.
“We’re very fortunate to have the good will of such acclaimed creators and serious folks in the media and nonprofit spaces who matter and are down to build with us. Without partners, we are nothing and without distribution, the work never leaves the room,” said Mundo.
“Needless to say, we are psyched to do this thing,” Ghost told me via phone.
Ghost added, “It has been a long time coming, to be sure, but we are ready. A lot of crazy can happen between now and then, owing to the unpredictability of prison life, but we are locked in, and so proud to have this opportunity to build something that our younger peers can get exposed to, learn how to do and take over when we hand it off in order to build the next thing.”
Horton and American Book Award winning multi-instrumentalist Devin Waldman plan to travel to California this year and co-produce the Lifer Cypher segments at Valley State Prison, from within the Rebirth Of Sound music studio, a ProTools-based program to be delivered by the Grammy/Oscar/Emmy winning rapper/actor/activist Common, whose Imagine Justice Now nonprofit organization has publicly declared VSP as the site of its impending programmatic launch.
Stay tuned.
