Poet, playwright, essayist and cultural critic Mark Nowak will respond to The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940 exhibition at the Block Museum in a reading and conversation. In the spirit of the Left Front, his poems give voice to working people, documenting the hardships wrought by economic downturns both here in the United States and around the world.

Frank Cunningham, Business Representative at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134 and a participant in the first workshop Nowak conducted in Chicago, will join Nowak for the program.

Mark Nowak is the author of three volumes of poetry, all from Coffee House Press: Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009). A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, Nowak is currently the director of the graduate creative writing program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY. This program is in partnership with the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium, American Studies, and Harris Feinsod’s course, “The Poetry of History in the Americas.”