2015 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism Honoring Mark Nowak

On April 2, Split This Rock presented the 2015 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, sponsored by the CrossCurrents Foundation, to Mark Nowak, for his extraordinary work fostering the voices of workers and bringing the stories and voices of workers to the center of poetry and public life.  

The ceremony was a resounding success, packing the house at the Arts Club of Washington. The three Finalists, Black Poets Speak Out/Mahogany L. Browne, Jonterri Gadson, Amanda Johnston; John Lee Clark; and Bob Holman, were also celebrated with a multimedia presentation during the ceremony, available below. 

Check out more photos, all by Kristin Adair, on Flickr here.

Split This Rock Executive Director Sarah Browning delivered opening remarks.

 Elexia "Lexi" Alleyne (top) and Milen Mehari (bottom), members of the 2015 DC Youth Slam Team, each performed a poem, impressing the entire audience with their talent. Check out Lexi's performance on Split This Rock's Youtube channel.

 Mahogany L. Browne (top), coordinator of Black Poets Speak Out, delivered a powerful performance of her poem "Black Girl Magic," to thunderous applause. Watch the video here.

A slideshow highlighted the work of the 2015 finalists: Black Poets Speak Out, John Lee Clark, and Bob Holman. Click on the video above to watch or go here.

CrossCurrents Foundation President Micheline Klagsbrun gave a short speech praising Split This Rock, the Freedom Plow Award, and Mark.

E. Ethelbert Miller, a judge for the 2015 Award, delivered the following judges' statement, written by one of his fellow judges, Sheila Black:

We know in our bones that poetry is not merely a luxury, an elite art, but a human force, necessary as bread, constant as air. Mark Nowak, a child of working class Buffalo, has been on a passionate, large, and determined mission to engage poetry with the hard troubles of our world, with lived experience. His work, documentary in nature, is composed of the testimony of workers, the parts of the machines they use, the history of their labors.  

He has said concerning his kind of poetry: “It needs to find its feet outside of AWP and art galleries and instead locate itself (or organize its potential location) on factory floors, on union halls…” He also said when asked whether what he wrote was more social history than poetry: “I am not a historian, I am a writer who would like to contribute to the rescue of the kidnapped memory of all America.”  

I ask us to pause and ponder this. We live in an era when the life of work—the miners, the factory workers, the retail clerks and fast food workers, the part-time security guards, and hotel maids—is often simply not spoken of in what we call poetry. We are urged by advertisers and the global multi-nationals they represent to forget that workers exist, to believe the goods they produce appear as if by magic. 

Mark Nowak provides an antidote to this amnesia. In his poetry, the community workshops he holds with workers nationally and transnationally, and his blog, Coal Mountain—which provides a running commentary on the extraction industry worldwide—he reminds us of the material and the material suffering these goods are actually composed of, the lives they swallow and ruin. 

And this effort is beautiful, not only because it is truth, but also because of Mark Nowak’s profound grasp of how language works and what it does and does not do. Words, he tells us, have weight and force—they can have the force of truth or beauty: they can have the force of lies. They are like the surface of an etching in which we can see the traces of lived experience, the hard facticity of our material conditions and also the elusive palimpsest of vision and dream. He is, further, a poet who is revolutionary in working to examine how the collective voice  “we,” and not simply “I” can forge a new space for poetry to breathe in. 

E. Ethelbert Miller, Martha Collins, and I have been proud to serve as judges for the second annual Freedom Plow Award for Poetry and Activism. Mark Nowak was chosen out of a remarkable field of finalists—Black Poets Speak Out/Amanda Johnston, Mahogany Browne, Jonterri Gadson; DeafBlind poet and activist, John Lee Clark, and Bob Holman and his world languages project. His work and theirs remind us in the words of Noel Prize winner, Herta Muller, “The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become.”  

Last year, E. Ethelbert Miller said in his judges’ citation: “One poem strikes a match. One poem is a spark. One poet can push or pull us into tomorrow.”

This seems especially relevant tonight.

Please join me in welcoming the extraordinary poet and global activist Mark Nowak.

Sarah Browning and E. Ethelbert Miller presented the 2015 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism to Mark Nowak.

Mark Nowak gave his remarks, shared a teaser from an upcoming documentary, and read from his book of poetry, Coal Mountain Elementary. He was both hilarious and poignant.

Mark signed copies of his books and spoke with enthusiastic attendees.

Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009)

Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2006)

Special thanks to everyone who made this event the tremendous success it was, especially to the sponsor, the CrossCurrents Foundation, and the cosponsors, the Arts Club of Washington and FOLIO Magazine. Thank you to all the volunteers that helped out with the event, and to everyone who came out to celebrate! We hope you'll join us again in 2017!

Interview with Mark Nowak, 2015 Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism Recipient

The Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, sponsored by the CrossCurrents Foundation, recognizes and honors a poet who is doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. The award, judged this year by Sheila Black, Martha Collins, and E. Ethelbert Miller, is being given for the second time in 2015. Tickets now on sale! Join us on April 2, at the Arts Club of Washington, as we honor Mark Nowak for his work in establishing "poetry dialogues" among workers around the globe. 

ABOUT MARK NOWAK

Poet, cultural critic, playwright, essayist, and director of the graduate creative writing program at Manhattanville College, Mark Nowak is the winner of this year's Freedom Plow Award. A true poet activist, Mark has a longtime commitment to labor issues. Encouraging deep workers' solidarity, he exposes every mining disaster in the world through his blog and facilitates "poetry dialogues" among workers across the globe. Mark is the author of three books of poetry, all of which can also be viewed as studies of labor economy under global capitalism: Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2008). He is the editor of Then and Now: Theodore Enslin’s Selected Poems, 1943-1993 (National Poetry Foundation, 1999) and, with Diane Glancy, Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings after the Detours (Coffee House Press, 1999). Since 1997 he has been the editor of Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics.  Nowak was awarded the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship.

SPLIT THIS ROCK INTERVIEWS MARK NOWAK

What inspired your commitment to labor issues? And when did you first start thinking about language as a means for social change?

My family was certainly my first and deepest inspiration. My grandma, Stella, dropped out of elementary school to become a domestic worker. She was later a Teamster and a Rosie-the-Riveter. Her husband, my grandpa, spent his working life in the roll mill at the behemoth Bethlehem Steel Plant in Lackawanna, NY. My dad was Vice President of his union at the Westinghouse plant in Buffalo for many years. And my mom was a clerical worker for most of her career. Then, amidst a sea of terrible teachers in middle school and high school, one teacher (who I’m still friends with), Michael Pikus, told me I should start reading books by Albert Camus and George Orwell and the existentialists. My life hasn’t been the same since then. I’d also add that being part of the punk and electronic music scene and playing in bands in Buffalo and Toronto in my late teens and early 20s helped to politicize me. I’ve written about those years in an essay that came out in Goth: Undead Subculture.

Can you discuss the role of dialogue in your poetry activism?

To me, the poetry workshop is such an important tool for use in progressive organizations like workers centers or repressive institutions like the prison industrial complex because it can operate in what I like to call both the first person singular and the first person plural – the “I” and the “We”. What emerges from my poetry workshops with workers centers and global trade unions, for example, is both a valuation of individual workers’ stories AND the collective understanding that these stories are simultaneously isolated events happening to individuals and repressions that are happening to workers across the world. Thus, the workshops help to build both the confidence in workers’ individual voices and their belief in shared struggle and collective resistance.

How do news outlets trigger and influence your poetry?

Every day, one of the first news sources I look at is Labourstart. It’s very easy to form an opinion that the working class and the trade unions are a dying breed if all you listen to is the U.S. corporate media. But Labourstart reminds me each and every day of the hundreds and thousands of workers around the world who are rebelling in small and large ways. This kind of daily practice utterly shifts my perspective of living in this world and inspires me to continue to do the work I do.

What audience(s) do you keep in mind when you write and publish your poetry?

Every poet wants to say “the public,” of course. But for me, I really want to create work that is simultaneously and equally of interest to the literary community and to global workers. I want to feel equally confident and proud when reading the exact same piece at a literary center and at a union hall. I can’t just write for one or the other, or different pieces for each group. I have to write for them together. This is the only way I can be satisfied with what I produce.

As a professor at Manhattanville College, how does teaching connect to the process and product of your poetry and community building?

When I arrived at Manhattanville, I immediately developed a required MFA seminar on critical pedagogy and the teaching of creative writing in the community. My students read, watch videos, and examine and critique the history of writers in the schools, prisons, community centers, and workplaces. They watch films like Louder Than a Bomb and read books by everyone from Paulo Freire to Joy James. And I’m happy to see a growing number of my former students now teaching writing workshops at Bedford Women’s Prison, Sing Sing, and elsewhere. Others have gone on to develop poetry workshops for women recently diagnosed with breast cancer and women living at domestic violence shelters. This work by our Manhattanville MFA alums really inspires me.

What are you working on now?

We’ve recently won a three-year grant to open a school/institute for worker writers at the PEN American Center in New York City, so I’m developing the first semester’s classes that will start in early April. We’ll meet for five straight weeks and write new poems that we’ll premiere at an event in the PEN World Voices Festival on Saturday, May 9. More info is available at our brand new website, http://www.workerwriters.org. Then we’re going to put together a weekend retreat/festival for worker writers on Governor’s Island this summer.

What is one piece of yours that you are most proud of?

I’m actually most proud of the poems produced by the workers in my workshops. And though I might cite all of them, I guess it’d be good to turn back to the beginning. The first workshop I ever taught exclusively for workers happened at the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies, headed by the great labor historian Bob Bruno. One of the students in that class was Frank Cunningham from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW Local 139). Frank wrote an incredible poem about seeing the electrical work he’d done in the skyscrapers of Chicago, knowing it was his work that made the lights on the Chicago skyline shine as they did in the night sky. The workshop was more than a decade ago and I lost touch with Frank for several years. But when we got back in contact, he told me that he’d recently entered the poem in a contest and won third place. It was the Robert Frost poetry competition and Frank’s poem was published in The Saturday Evening Post. Frank’s story reminds me how much poetry matters to workers who take these workshops and how powerful and important the stories of their working lives can be in bringing social, economic, and political change for workers around the world.

Mark Nowak's May Day post on Harriet

Mark Nowak, a featured poet at Split This Rock 2010, labor activist, cultural critic, Professor at Washington College, Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House, and good friend recently penned a post at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog. With so much going on at the intersection of poetry and politics, Mark efficiently sheds light on a variety of current projects, poets, conversations, meetings, and movements - all in one fell swoop.

He also makes a little nod to last month's successful Sunday Kind of Love that featured Chicago-based slam poet Kevin Coval and our very own DC Youth Slam Team. This was a collaboration between Split This Rock and the Rose O'Neill Literary House.

And most importantly, Mark gives a little nudge to all you good people out there to get cracking on your proposal submissions for Split This Rock 2012! He wants to see you there - and so do we!

Thanks, Mark!

Check out his post here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/may-day/

New Labor Journalism

Click the image to expand.

Continuing our list of upcoming AWP events:


Saturday, February 5th, 1:30 pm
Mariott Wardman Park, Marriott Ballroom, Lobby Level


Undivided: Poet as Public Citizen

Sponsored by Split This Rock Poetry Festival
With: Melissa Tuckey, Toi Derricotte, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Mark Nowak

Split This Rock celebrates poetry of provocation and witness and the role of poet as public citizen. In a time of multiple wars, economic, social, and environmental crises, this panel will discuss the role of poets and poetry in public life. Shelley described the poet as "unacknowledged legislator." What does this mean in the age of Fox News and corporate lobbyists? What are some of the ways that poets are engaging with the larger public in the United States and abroad? Who are the models for this work? How might we begin to think of ourselves as undivided: both citizen and poet?

Melissa Tuckey is a poet, activist, and translator. She’s author of /Rope as Witness/ (chapbook: Pudding house) and has received numerous awards for her work, including a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship.She’s a co-founder of Split This Rock, and currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Toi Derricotte earned her B.A. in special education from Wayne State University and her M.A. in English literature from New York University. Her books of poetry include Tender (1997) which won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). She is also the author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton, 1997), which won the 1998 Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Martín Espada has published seventeen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; his next collection, The Trouble Ball, is forthcoming from Norton in spring 2011. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.. Carolyn Forché teaches in the MFA Program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Mark Nowak is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist, whose writings include Shut Up Shut Down (afterword by Amiri Baraka), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and the recently published book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), that Howard Zinn has called “a stunning educational tool.”