Writing Political Poetry with Mark Nowack

Participants in this workshop will read and create poems that address contemporary economic, cultural, and environmental crises such as housing foreclosures, the debt crisis, and global warming, with the help of literary precursors such as Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich. We will begin with June Jordan’s notion that “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” From there, we will write and discuss new poems we draft in class that speak our own indelible truth to power.

MARK NOWAK’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and Coal Mountain Elementary, which Howard Zinn called “a stunning educational tool.” Nowak is currently facilitating poetry workshops with immigrant & migrant farmworkers in Florida (a collaboration with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) and the Hudson River Valley (a collaboration with the Workers Justice Center and the PEN World Voices Festival). A 2010 Guggenheim fellow, Nowak directs the MFA program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.