Cultural Writing. Essays. !WORKERS OF THE WORD, UNITE AND FIGHT! examines current crises in the literary landscape and book culture of the United States. Nowak's influential essay on not-for-profit literary centers in the era of corporate mergers is republished here in conjunction with his previously unavailable essay, "Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry"--a challenge to public intellectuals, culture workers, and collectives to impede and revise the American MFA industry and its subsidiary industries through cultural adjustments. This new essay also outlines the interventions of the Union of Radical Workers and Writers in its struggle to organize a Borders bookstore in Minneapolis.

Workers of the Word, Unite and Fight!

Politics & Social Sciences

Nowak, Mark

Politics & Government

Palm Press

Mark Nowak encounters the whispers of creation and cultural remembrance in his eminent, visionary poetry. Revenants is an original return to a splendid ethos of ancestral word patterns, and the images bear the solemn pleasures of time, place, and singular landscapes.—Gerald Vizenor This first book length collection of poetry by the editor of the journal XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics explores the Polish American neighborhoods in and around Buffalo, New York, finding collective truths in the particularity of a unique culture. Mark Nowak is the editor of Theodore Enslin’s selected poems, Then, and Now, and an associate professor at the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His poems have been anthologized in An Anthology of New (American) Poets and Children of the Cold War: A Scrapbook.

Revenants

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Coffee House Press

In the grand, narrative tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks and Edward Sanders, this riveting collection of poetic plays and photo-documentary poems exposes the human cost of corporate greed and gives voice to the growing crisis faced in communities across America.
“The several long poems that make up this book build into each other with devastating force and understatement, breaking poetic boundaries, regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature.”—Adrienne Rich
Mark Nowak is the author of the critically acclaimed debut book of poems Revenants, the editor of Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics and the co-editor of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours. He grew up in Buffalo, New York and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he is active in the labor movement.

Shut Up Shut Down

History & Criticism

A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.
A poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for “regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature,” Mark Nowak regularly leads transnational poetry workshops between American and international trade unions. The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.

Coal Mountain Elementary

Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

Social Poetics