Randall Horton: 7:00pm 12/11/19, WTY Auditorium

Randall Horton’s past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently, a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir, published by Augury Books/Brooklyn Art Press. He is currently Poet-in-Residence at Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the American legal system in Washington, DC. Horton is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which recently received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Haven. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he now resides in Harlem, New York.

Chanelle Benz: Nov. 14, 2019, 7:00 pm, W.T. Young Auditorium

Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta.com, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence, and The Cupboard, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, was named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle and one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017. It won the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas Book Award for fiction. Her novel, The Gone Dead, was published by Ecco Press in June 2019. She currently lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College.

New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author four novels, most recently An American Marriage, an Oprah’s Book Club Selection that appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and end of the year roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. With over 500,000 copies in print domestically, it has been published in fifteen countries. Jones, a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow was added to the NEA Big Read Library of Classics in 2016. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University. Presented by the Gaines Center for the Humanities.