with author Mark Nowak

in conversation with ESFL’s Peter Rachleff and Holly Krig & Jason Evans

This event will be live streamed to our Facebook page and later uploaded to our YouTube channel

Mark Nowak grew up in a working-class family in Buffalo, New York. His mother was a clerical worker and his father became vice president of his union at a Westinghouse assembly plant, shuttered in 1985. After working at Wendy’s in his twenties, Nowak earned an MFA and taught at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. There, he participated in organizing (especially the bookstore unionization movement) and authored three volumes of poetry which provided “documentary” looks at working class life.

Mark also developed new strategies to amplify — rather than appropriate — the language of workers, and to transform the idea of “working-class poetry.” In 2006 he conducted a workshop with workers (members of the UAW) at St. Paul’s Ford plant who were facing closure and the loss of their jobs. Their experience inspired Mark to imagine poetry as a vehicle for global solidarity among workers. He filmed the Ford workers reading their poems, then took the video to South Africa, where he played it during workshops with members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa at Ford plants in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, creating a “transnational poetry dialogue” about shared working conditions.

Jason Evans works within the Minnesota State Colleges and University system as a mathematics tutor and instructor. He is a member of AFSCME.

Holly Krig is an abolitionist organizer, artist, and mom to an 8 year old named Sophie Lucy Parsons. Holly is also the Director of Organizing with Moms United Against Violence & Incarceration and a co-founder of numerous organizations, more recently, the Chicago Community Bond Fund.

Join Mark virtually as he discusses this project and how it has laid a foundation for his work with domestic workers, taxi drivers, and fast food workers who explored new strategies of collectivity through poetry — writing together, harmonizing their voices, finding shared refrains, and, through Nowak, sharing their experiences with distant workers they formerly viewed as strangers, even competitors.

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