Horizons Creative Writing Outreach

Horizons offers twice-monthly creative writing workshops to homeless mothers and older children living at family shelters in Chicago.At least 75 writers participate each year. The women’s poems and essays are published online in the Horizons Reading Room, and in booklets distributed during a spring showcase – in 2013, to be held on Thursday, June 13 (5 p.m.) at the Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 756 N. Milwaukee Ave.

This program is led by Senior Community Organizer Wayne Richard, a staff member since 2000. Wayne first became involved with CCH as a leader, when he was living in a West Side shelter that hosted the writing program.

“At the time I started, I didn’t even know I could write,” he says. Wayne’s poetry has since been published, featured in poetry slams, and performed on WBEZ Public Radio and WGN-TV.

“Everyone has a song to sing,” says Wayne, pointing to pieces written by participants that range from emotional to wistful, hopeful to angry. Most of the writing is “about relationships to someone or to something – the lack of, or need of, or appreciation of relationships.”

Horizons is supported by grants from the Seabury Foundation, Rothman Family Foundation, and from the Selma Breskin Kaplan Foundation, given in memory of her daughter, Terri.

For more information, contact organizer Wayne Richard at (312) 641-4140 or wrichard@chicagohomeless.org.

To learn more about Wayne’s story, watch his autobiographical video Sofas: