#workerwriters

With emcee, Tanya Hollis

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

Copresented by The Poetry Center and the Labor Archives and Research Center

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Join us as Mark Nowak and Worker Writers School poets Lorraine Garnett, Davidson Garrett, Seth Goldman, Christine Lewis, Alando McIntyre, and Kele Nkhereanye present Coronavirus Haiku, new from Kenning Editions, and talk about their life as “frontline workers” during the Covid 19 crisis and their engagement with the Worker Writers School. Copresented by SF State's Labor Archive and Research Center and The Poetry Center. With emcee Tanya Hollis, Interim Director, LARC.

     Stimulus package     
     Can't buy the acre nor the mule.
     Oh, our pow'r wanes.
                                          —Alando McIntyre

     ok, key, wallet, mask
     stay away, too close, hold that train!
     S*** I forgot the milk
                                         —Paloma Zapata

     Covid 19 took
     A mother away, her kid
     Waits for her return

     No way to explain
     No more hugs and no more kisses
     Now: just ashes
                                     —Nimfa Despabiladeras, two haiku in memory of Arlena Juanico

The Worker Writers School supports writers from one of New York City’s most ubiquitous yet least-heard populations: low-wage workers. Mark Nowak, a writer and founding director of the school, presents a selection of haiku written by “frontline workers” during the Covid 19 crisis. The poets included here had already been studying examples of the form and its connection to political resistance from seventeenth-century Japan to the Black Arts Movement of the twentieth century, as well as it's capacity to amplify voices of everyday life. These “coronavirus haiku” convey moments of protest, solace, wonder, certainty, love, and strife. The writers in this anthology hail from the school’s worker center partners in New York City including Domestic Workers United, New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Street Vendor Project, and Retail Action Project: Thomas Barzey, Kerl Brooks, Estabon Chimilio, Nimfa Despabiladeras, Lorraine Garnett, Davidson Garrett, Seth Goldman, Christine Lewis, Doreen McGill, Alando McIntyre, Kelebohile Nkhereanye, Alfreda Small, and Paloma Zapata.

Mark Nowak is a poet, cultural critic, playwright and essayist, from Buffalo, New York. Nowak is the author of three poetry collections: Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009), Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004), and Revenants (Coffee House Press, 2000). A portion of his critical book, Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020), chronicles his work with the Worker Writers School.

• “Whether unpacking Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘unity of the emerging idea,’ demonstrating the practical application of alliteration, or recalling his daughter teaching youth prison poets origami, Mark Nowak testifies to the urgency and intimacy of poetry in our prisons, union halls, and workers’ centers. Social Poetics tracks what happens when people gather around poems: conjunctions, dialogues, imaginative militancy, solidarities. This supple, comprehensive book is a study in the poetics of bearing witness, bearing tools, and bearing possibilities.” —Terrance Hayes

• “Social Poetics materializes imaginative militancy. With a litany of the social as pervasive and intimate, and political memories of life-and-death struggles for justice, Nowak crafts a transformative workshop for the collective. This is an important record of how the people’s power, poetry, and history maintain us and the beauty of our world(s).” —Joy James

Worker Writers School

Labor Archives and Research Center

Image: Mark Nowak and Workers Writer School poets at PEN America

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center and the Labor Archives and Research Cente

With emcee Patrick Marks

Guest poets Leticia Del Toro and Josiah Luis Alderete

Copresented by The Poetry Center, the Howard Zinn Book Fair, and The Green Arcade

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Three outstanding Bay Area writer-activists, reading and in conversation on the radical potential written in the margins of history. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, renowned historian and activist (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States), reads from Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Beacon Press, 2021) and Amy Sonnie and James Tracy read from their newly updated Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing (Melville House, 2011/revised edition 2021). Following their readings, the writers engage in conversation with one another and the audience. With emcee Patrick Marks, and guest poets Leticia Del Toro and Josiah Luis Alderete. Copresented by the Howard Zinn Book Fair, The Green Arcade, and The Poetry Center. 

• "...This myth-shattering book [Dunbar-Ortiz's Not "A Nation of Immigrants] addresses one of the most pressing challenges of our time. If there is hope for transformation, it is through the careful, systematic work that this book exemplifies by examining the roots of racism and structural inequality, and bringing forward alternative narratives and movements." —Alexandra Délano Alonso
   
• "Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz rightly argues that the United States is not 'a nation of immigrants but, more accurately, a nation of colonizers. A must-read." —Nick Estes (Lakota)
   
• “Hillbilly Nationalists recovers the voices of white, working-class radicals who prove abolitionist John Brown’s legacy is alive and well... Focusing on the 1960s–70s and touching on issues just as relevant today, these authors challenge the Left not to ignore white America, while challenging white America to recognize its allegiance to humanity and justice, rather than the bankrupt promises of conservative politicians.” —Angela Y. Davis

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.

Amy Sonnie is an activist, educator, and librarian who has worked with U.S. grassroots social justice movements for the past seventeen years. She is co-founder of the National Center for Media Justice. Her first book, Revolutionary Voices, an anthology by and for queer and transgender youth (Alyson Books, 2000), is banned in libraries in New Jersey and Texas and appears on the American Library Association’s list of “Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books.” Her work has appeared in the San Fransisco Bay Guardian, Alternet, Philadelphia Inquirer, Clamor, the Oxygen Television Network, Bitch magazine, and The Sojourner.

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D Press: The Civil Disobedience Handbook and The Military Draft Handbook. His articles have appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, and Contemporary Justice Review.

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center, The Green Arcade, and Howard Zinn Book Fair