Horace Mungin, author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, dies at age 80 | Local and state news

Horace Mungin, a Hollywood native and resident of Givhans who has written numerous books on life in America, particularly aspects of the African-American experience, died on Saturday. He was 80 years old.

His friend Herb Frazier, who co-edited a new volume of breed essays with Mungin for Evening Post Books, confirmed the death. Mungin was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017.

He left South Carolina at the age of 5 when his family moved to New York. He spent part of his childhood in Harlem and, from the age of 9, in the New Amsterdam Houses on the West Side of Manhattan, the former district of San Juan Hill, which had been a favorite ground for artists. and black entrepreneurs during the early part of the 20th century.

As a teenager he discovered books, obsessed with basketball and jazz, and dreamed of playing the flute, but never quite managed to commit to becoming good at it.

At 18, he joined the military and served three years even though he hated that the service was still largely separated. The experience led him to write an article which he entitled “The Long Arm of Segregation”.

After his military service, Mungin immersed himself head first in poetry and continued to write essays and monographs, all informed by life experiences. He immersed himself in the black arts movement and volunteered for anti-drug campaigns in New York City. From 1968 he took a job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority as a subway driver.

He met Gussie, the woman who would become his wife, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. They get married the following year.

Mungin reveled in the pleasures of reading (he loved Russian novelists and the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer) and the writing profession. During the first part of the 1970s, he edited the magazine “Black Forum”.

In 1989, he retired from the MTA and returned to South Carolina. He and Gussie moved into a house he had built for them in Givhans, near Ridgeville, where Mungin liked to take care of his vegetable garden.

Since then, he had doubled his handwriting. It has become a staple of the Black Ink Book Festival in Charleston, an event featuring African-American authors and their work.

“He’s really passionate about a wide range of topics,” event co-organizer Steven Hoffius told The Post and Courier in 2018. “Partly because of his age and experience, he’s really wise. “That makes him important to Black Ink. He’s sort of a mentor to new writers.”

In 2020, Evening Post Books published Mungin’s last volume of poetry titled “Notes from 1619”.

“Horace was a bridge to help create an understanding between whites and blacks,” said Michael Nolan, editor of Evening Post Books. “He believed that by increasing knowledge, people could come to a better place.”

His latest project, a collection of writings co-edited with Frazier, is called “Ukewli: Searching for Healing Truth, South Carolina Writers and Poets Explore American Racism”. Its release is slated for the first part of next year.

Frazier said the book is an outgrowth of the Ukweli program Mungin organized for McLeod Plantation, which involved readings and public presentations. The two men decided at the end of 2020 to extend the project to more writers and to produce a book. Everything quickly fell into place and Mungin was able to see the first draft of the volume before his death.

“One of his last comments when he called me on September 18 was, ‘Take care of our project,’” Frazier said.