Mark Nowak is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist, whose writings include
Shut Up Shut Down (afterword by Amiri Baraka), a
New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and the recently published book on coal mining disasters in the US and China,
Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), that Howard Zinn has called “a stunning educational tool.”
Nowak’s unique work in bringing innovative aesthetics and working-class communities into dialogue has resulted in a dynamic array of projects and publications. Following a model he designed at Ford plants in the United States and South Africa (through the United Auto Workers and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa), Nowak’s transnational worker-to-worker poetry dialogues create a unique opportunity for working people to analyze, communicate, and express (through poetry) their ideas and emotions about their work, particularly in workspaces experiencing the effects of downsizing, plant closings, worker-management tensions, or strikes.
Nearly a decade ago, Nowak founded the Union of Radical Workers and Writers, and his projects with them have included the unionization of a Borders bookstore, an essay in the
Progressive on the plight of big box chain and independent bookstore workers, and a forthcoming edited volume of stories by workers who unionized bookstores (including Powells, etc.) across the US and Canada.
Nowak’s poetry, similarly, has engaged central issues of work, family, and community. His verse play on Reagan’s firing of striking PATCO air traffic controllers, “Capitalization,” has been staged at both major theaters (Stage Left in Chicago, the Cleveland Public Theatre) and at rallies for striking Northwest Airlines mechanics. He is one of a dozen poets to have been included in the seminal anthology
American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press). His ethnographic essay on gothic-industrial music in rust belt America was recently published in
Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press).
In his projects and publications, Nowak is, as poet Adrienne Rich has written of his work, “regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature.”
