For Immediate Release
Date:
March 30, 2011
Contact: Horace Mungin, horacemungin@aol.com
(843) 875-3886
Poetic Portraits: The African People of San Juan Hill
By Horace Mungin
(Charleston, SC) Poetic Portraits marks Horace Mungin’s successful
return to the poetry genre after writing 5 books of fiction and historical fiction. Inspired by the work of Amir Baraka, Mungin
started writing poetry at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the late sixties. His first collection Dope Hustler’s
Jazz won him an award from the Negro Book Club Inc., and started his anti-drug activism.
After the publication in 1991 of the first book in his Sleepy Willie
sartorial series Mungin spent a long career writing fiction novels. Now he has returned to poetry with the April 25, 2011
publication of Poetic Portraits: The African People of San Juan Hill, which is an urban anthropological dig through the ruins
of a 1950’s New York City neighborhood once known as San Juan Hill. The author has landscaped the customs, Language,
and social habits of over 200 subjects of the Amsterdam Projects. They are all sketched in poetic portraits that uncover the
unique quality that exist among them; a quality that united them into a solid nurturing community.
Sift through the sands of relations that formed a cohesive cultivating atmosphere that
promoted a high degree of success in the community’s youth in a neighborhood that was rift with poverty and ravaged
with the racism of the times. You’ll come away from this study knowing that you were in at the start of this new type
of urban anthropology. Read these poems as you would a novel or a factual travel guide to an exotic past. You will be on an
expedition through the complex human relationships that developed out of that most innate of all human instincts, the will
to endure.
About the Author:
Horace Mungin was born in Hollywood, South Carolina in 1941. He grew up in New York City where
he attended public schools, and majored in English at Fordham
University. He served three years in the U.S. Army and was a member of
the 82nd Airborne Division. He lived in New York
until 1989.
Horace Mungin has written 7 books of poetry, fiction and historical fiction. He has published in 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, The Oxford
American and The New York Times. Horace Mungin is listed in the S. C. Writers Directory and the Directory of American Poets
and Fiction Writers. He has read his works at the New School
for Social Research, Furman University,
Moja Arts Festival, and Piccolo Spoleto. His short fiction has won the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open two years running (’01,
’02).
Horace Mungin is available for interviews, speaking engagements, readings and book signings.
Horace and his wife, Gussie, live in Ridgeville, SC. They have three sons and six grandchildren
