Horace Mungin

1968 was the year that I published my first boardside volume of poetry in a book entitled "Dope Huslter's Jazz." 1968 was the year that the world came into view and inaction was no longer possible for me. I had been a community activist in an inner-city community organization that focused on drug intervention and youth guidance, but 1968 made me "wanna hollar" about the larger picture and "the way they do my life." Even those who weren't alive in 1968 know about it from history books - 1968 was an histortic year that will be discussed for a century.

I was born in Hollywood, South Carolina in 1941. My family fled to New York City in 1946 where I grew up and where I attended public schools. The first school I attended was P. S. 89 in Harlem. It was across the street from the Countee Cullen branch of the city's library system. My school and the library partnered to run an after school program called "Story hour" in which pretty librarians read stories to children after school. This program fired my imagination and planted literary seeds in my genes. I later majored in English at Fordham Unversity. I joined the army in 1960 and was a member of the 82nd Airborne Division and I started to read the touch-guy, artfully simplistic writings of Earnest Hemingway. The dormant literary seeds, fertilzed by the events of the time, started to spout up in me.

In 1969, I published "Now See Here, Homes," another collection of poetry that reflected my views as a community activist by railing against drug uses. I was cited as "Artist of the Month" by the Nergo Book Club, Inc. for that work. I help found "Black Forum" magazine in 1973 and was its first editor-In-chief. Black Forum became a nationally acclaimed magazine for writers. I also edited "Press Time," a very popular literary newsletter for several years. Inbetween this time, I was also writing a syndicated weekly newspaper column called "Sleepy Willie." Sleepy Willie was a take-off on Langston Hughes' character "Jesse B. Simple" which employed satircal humor as a means to explore the questions of race and politics. This led to a book entitled "Sleepy Willie Talks about Life" which was published in 1991. Willie is a Bronx street-philosopher who fled South Carolina under the threat of death in 1944 and has never crossed the Mason-Dixon line since. The second book in the series, "Sleepy Willie Sings the Blues" was published in 2001 and was completely comprised of previously unpublished sketches. The third book in the trilogy, which will return Sleepy Willie, after more than half a century, back to South Carolina, is coming.

I had made a seamless switch from poetry to prose in the 1980s, a time when my work was published in major magizines and newspapers. In 1989, my wife and I relocated to South Carolina and I heightened my focus on fiction prose. "The Devil Beats His Wife," a collection of short stories was published in 2004. This is a book of short fiction all based in the Charleston Lowcountry area and except for one, in the modern South with the vast racial changes as a backdrop. I published "San Juan Hill," a memoir about growing up in the Amsterdam projects in New York City during the fifties. It's a coming of age story of how from the wretched arose the worthy. in May 2008, Mycurrent book "Subway: Afther the Irish," was published. Subway is the story of the ethnic transition in the New York City transit work force that occured in the sixites and seventies. For the first time, the Irish workers who were retiring were not replaced by their better educated sons making room for the huge influx of African-American workers. It's an engrossing ride - witty, bumpy and on time.

My work has been published in the New York Times, Essence Magazine, Encore Newsmagazine, Black Books Bulletin, Disc & That, The Lincoln Review, Blind Beggar Press, Ninety-Six Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, The Point Newspaper, Nommo, Black Out Loud, and other publications.