Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary

Please Note: This event has been postponed due to unforseen circumstances. It will be rescheduled in the future. Thanks for your interest.

Talking Leaves…Books is pleased to host area native Mark Nowak for a reading and book signing for his new collection of poems Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press). Photographs of Chinese miners taken by photojournalist Ian Teh accompany Nowak’s poems. The event will take place at our Main Street store on Thursday, July 23, at 7 pm. Books are currently available and can be purchased at the reading; there is no admission charge.

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, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh. With this book Nowak joins fellow Buffalonian, photographer Milton Rogovin, in bringing to light and to public attention the lives of miners and mining communities around the world.

“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.”—Howard Zinn

“Mark Nowak’s vital poetry cleaves to the hard surfaces of working lives. There is an epic quality to the voices that cannot be dismissed by corporations or the state. Coal Mountain Elementary will move readers to indignation and action.”—Aihwa Ong

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. He is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and editor of the journal XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He is the author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award. A native of Buffalo, New York, he now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.