Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN, all from Coffee House Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Creative Capital foundations. Nowak wrote the introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). He is founding director of the Worker Writers School.