Resource: Worker Writers

Worker Writers, an institute founded and directed by poet Mark Nowak, organizes and facilitates poetry workshops with global trade unions, workers’ centers, and other progressive labor organizations. These workshops create a space for participants to re-imagine their working lives, nurture new literary voices directly from the global working class, and produce new tactics and imagine new futures for working class social change.

Worker Writers has run workshops with organizations as varied as Domestic Workers United in New York City, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, Justice for Domestic Workers in London, and the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union in Amsterdam and The Hague. For the past four years, Worker Writers has facilitated annual workshops for the PEN World Voices Festival.

Other links:
PEN American Center
Organization for Undocumented Workers
The Working-Class Studies Association supports scholarship, teaching and activism related to working-class life and cultures.