Families from T.A.B. South I shelter with organizer Wayne Richard, taken during their April 2010 outing to the DuSable Museum of African American History to see the "Freedom Sisters" exhibit.   

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 I & 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, a Princeton Project 55 fellow and summa cum laude graduate of Princeton's 2006 class. While at CCH, Mimi was awarded an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in prose. She co-ran Horizons until mid-2009, when she left to pursue graduate studies in creative writing from the University of Texas-Austin.

To read the work of Horizons writers, please visit our Reading Room.

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

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