Reading and Concert: Poet Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary, plus labor songs!

Reading and Concert:
Poet Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary, with a performance of labor songs by the Twin Cities Labor Chorus

Thursday, May 7, 7 p.m.
Rondo Community Outreach Library, 461 North Dale Street
Coal Mountain Elementary is a singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Mark Nowak. Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China, and full-color photographs of Chinese miners by renowned photojournalist, Ian Teh.

After the reading, the Twin Cities Labor Chorus will present labor songs in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Little Red Songbook.

Coal Mountain Blog - Mark Nowak is the author of Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009) and Shut Up Shut Down (Coffee House Press, 2004). For the past several years he has been designing and facilitating “poetry dialogues” with Ford autoworkers in the United States and South Africa (through the UAW and NUMSA), striking clerical workers (through AFSCME 3800), Muslim/Somali nurses and healthcare workers (through Rufaidah), and others. A native of Buffalo, New York, he now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota where he is an Associate Professor at the College of St. Catherine. Visit the Blog

Part of the Untold Stories Labor History Series
http://www.thefriends.org/untold.htm