MARK NOWAK & CLAIMING OUR VOICE
June 15 2014
Housing Authorities
For more than a decade, poet Mark Nowak has been facilitating collaborative creative writing workshops with trade unions and progressive labor organizations. Housing Authorities features a poetry workshop with participants from Justice for Domestic Workers (UK) and several New York City-based domestic worker organizations as well as filmmaker Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel’s Claiming Our Voice, a short documentary film sharing the stories of Andolan, an organization founded and led by South Asian immigrant low-wage workers.
Photography by Angela Jimenez
Mark Nowak is the author of Revenants (Coffee House Press, 2000), Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2008), and Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009). His writings on new labor poetics have recently appeared in The Progressive, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press), and Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press). In addition to facilitating “poetry dialogues” between Ford autoworkers at plants in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa, Nowak is editing a section on late-apartheid worker poets for an anthology forthcoming from Wesleyan as well as a special double issue of the journal he founded in 1996, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, on South African literature and social movements.