Dr. Randall Horton, Ph.D., the nation’s only fully tenured professor of English teaching with seven felonies at University of New Haven (UNH), left prison more than two decades ago and has since won two American Book Awards for his written and spoken poetry, published an award-winning memoir, and claimed multiple literary fellowships, all while serving as a mentor and prison reform advocate seeking to empower incarcerated creators with the agency he was denied while confined. As the co-founder of Radical Reversal, he oversees a nonprofit effort that builds media spaces inside carceral settings that deliver audio and music tools to residents at the intersection of literature.
Horton’s Radical Reversal audio podcast airs on UNH’s campus radio station WNHU at 88.7FM with departmental Dean support, featuring incarcerated poets performing 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 whereby they 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.
“I’ve chosen to work with the creators of Barz Behind Bars (B3) in California because they aren’t just capable poets, college students, and mentors in the literacy space, but because while being all those things they are also selfless community builders and legitimate thought leaders driving the very conversation we all need to be having concerning the manner in which the place they still call prison can bend toward justice via journalism. They are the action work personified. They deserve agency.”
In 2022, Horton, who serves as a Freedom Reads Literary Ambassador, along with American Book Award-winning 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 B3 poetry workshop at Valley State Prison (VSP). “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,” Horton says. “They represent the community we exist to serve.”
Describing how the virtual interview collaboration came about, Horton told me “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 in the same year, in a way we have each advocated forever.”
Ghostwrite Mike and The Mundo Press, two writers who recently were awarded Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild fellowships and write regularly for this platform’s Social Justice Bureau about carceral life, were selected by Horton to produce an audio version of their interview format Inner Views within his Radical Reversal podcast.
“We study the difference between rap and the high bar work of elevated MFA society poetry, as well as the art of dialogue,” Ghost said, “and we’re giving voice to a future we hope to inhabit that we haven’t seen or heard any other creators in confinement articulate yet. We’re not on anybody else’s blueprint here.” By all accounts, Ghost and Mundo are light years ahead of the country in this area and ideally situated at VSP to do something nobody on the inside has ever done before fusing poetry, music, and journalism in the podcast, audio book, and music publishing space.
Film producer, Anti-Recidivism Coalition founder, and prison reform advocate Scott Budnick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Heather Ann Thompson, Standard professor and poet A. Van Jordan, and Wesleyan professor and poet John Murillo have each agreed to participate in interviews with the duo for Inner Views, which will also appear in print online here at Vanguard News.
“We’re very fortunate to have the good will of such acclaimed creators and serious folks in the media and nonprofit spaces who honor creativity 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. “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 life on the inside, 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.”
Few incarcerated writers enjoy a Byline with public facing content – Ghost and Mundo do. Elevating interviews to include audio will require technology upgrades at VSP that normalize podcasting. Common’s Rebirth Of Sound music program is poised to launch at VSP where Ghost and Mundo hope to find a normalizing synergy of mentorship and Inner Views content that evolves how media is curated behind the wall.
