Mark Nowak
Canaan, NY & New York, NY
Mark Nowak is a writer and founding director of Work Writers School, which links the global working class to literary practice. He is author of three poetry collections: Revenants, Shut Up Shut Down, and Coal Mountain Elementary. Revenants was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Shut Up Shut Down became a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is also the writer of one prose work, Social Poetics, part autobiography, party literary criticism, part political theory. Nowak has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations as well as the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock. As founding director of the Worker Writers School (WWS), Nowak has been designing and facilitating projects to link working class communities to literary practice and poetry workshops in North America, Central America, Europe, and Africa for the past two decades. Articles on the WWS have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, New Yorker, Poetry Foundation (“Poem Talk” podcast), Laura Flanders Show, and elsewhere.
Photo: Lisa Arrastia.
Image of the WWS at Governor’s Island.
Image of the WWS at PEN America.
Image of the WWS at PEN World Voices Festival.
Image of the WWS Retreat with Barbara Smith.
Worker Writers School: Mobile Unit
Mark Nowak is a writer, and founding director of Work Writers School, which links the global working class to literary practice and the poetry workshop.
Artist BioWorker Writers School: Mobile Unit (WWSMU) expands Mark Nowak’s ongoing, twenty-year project of bringing poetry workshops directly to the working class. Like bookmobiles or food trucks, WWSMU visits laundromats, street corners, restaurants near construction sites, bus stops, and other locations that workers frequent to offer brief, intensive poetry writing classes.