Activating the Archives: Documentary Poetry & New Nonfiction
*The event has already taken place on this date: Sat, 10/25/2025
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Explore new ways of using personal and public records to create powerful, historically resonant new writing. Participants will learn how contemporary poets and nonfiction writers draw from family memorabilia, newspaper archives, community histories, government files, and other resources to both pose and respond to essential questions: What stories do archives preserve and omit? How can poetry and nonfiction writing activate the silences within them? Discussion and prompts will arise from texts by Muriel Rukeyser, Eduardo Galeano, Nobel Prize-winner Annie Ernaux, and Layli Long Soldier. A natural fit for writers, artists, teachers, librarians, community organizers, Activating the Archives invites anyone with curiosity about the past to investigate personal and public memories through this day-long, hands-on seminar. No prior creative writing experience is required.
Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Creative Capital foundations. Nowak recently wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022) as well as an essay, “Workshops of Abolition: Attica Print Culture and Small Press Poetry,” that was published in The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2024). He grew up on the East Side of Buffalo and is founding director of the Worker Writers School.
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