Mark Nowak


Mark Nowak is an American poet, as well as cultural critic, playwright and essayist, from Buffalo, New York.
Nowak is a professor in the English Department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.

Awards

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.

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.