The CCH creative writing program, Horizons, offers twice-monthly
creative writing workshops to homeless people living in three family
shelters on Chicago’s South Side and West Side.

Horizons is led by CCH 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.

Mr. Richard is assisted by Mimi Chubb, a 2006 Princeton University
graduate who started working at CCH in fall 2007 on a Princeton Project 55
fellowship. She earned her degree in English and a certificate in
creative writing summa cum laude. She was awarded a 2008 Illinois
Arts Council Artists Fellowship in Prose.

Check out Horizons writers' work in our Reading Room.

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