Our creative writing outreach program, Horizons, offers twice-monthly creative writing workshops to homeless people.

In 2009-10, outreach is being offered to homeless mothers living at It Takes a Village and T.A.B. South II Interim family shelters on the South Side, and to adults living in Mercy Housing Lakefront's South Loop SRO Apartments.  

Horizons is led by senior organizer Wayne Richard. Mr. Richard discovered his calling as a poet when he participated in an earlier CCH creative writing program. At that point in 1999, Mr. Richard was homeless and living in a shelter.

“At the time I started, I didn’t even know I could write,” Mr. Richard said.

No one had encouraged him to write anything since the fourth grade. Now Mr. Richard has published his poetry and performed it in poetry slams; his work has also been featured on WBEZ public radio and the WGN-TV Channel 9 morning news.

Horizons was launched in 2007 with help from Mimi Chubb, who joined the CCH staff as a Princeton Project 55 fellow. Mimi earned a bachelor's degree in English, graduating summa cum laude from Princeton in 2006 with a certificate in creative writing. While working at CCH Mimi was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship in prose. She co-ran Horizons outreach until mid-2009, when she left to pursue graduate studies in creative writing from the University of Texas-Austin.

To check out some of the work of Horizons writers, visit our Reading Room.

To find out more about Horizons, please contact Wayne Richard.