Mark Nowak

Mark Nowak is an award-winning American poet, as well as cultural critic, playwright and essayist, from Buffalo, New York.^[1] Nowak is currently the director of the graduate creative writing program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.^[2]

Awards

• 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship^[3]

Works

• Revenants, Coffee House Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-56689-107-3
• Shut up shut down, Coffee House Press, 2004, ISBN 9781566891639
• Coal Mountain Elementary, Photographs Mark Nowak, Ian Teh, Coffee House Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-56689-228-5

Reviews

There are only a handful of contemporary artists who have found a way to recontextualize the working class consciousness and activism of the American labor movement into the poetics and media art of the 21st century, but perhaps the most consistently provocative of these is Buffalo native Mark Nowak.^[4]

Coal Mountain Elementary is an imaginative and shocking reminder of what it means, in the most human and poignant terms, to be a miner, whether in this country or in China, or for that matter anywhere in the industrial world. It is also a tribute to miners and working people everywhere. It manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture. And it is a stunning educational tool.^[5]

References

External links

• BBC World News America
• "Against the Grain," KPFA
• "Conversation: Poet Mark Nowak and Director April Daras Discuss 'Coal Mountain Elementary'", PBS, April 24, 2009
• "Coal Mountain blog". wordpress. Retrieved September 21, 2010.