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 its 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.
