Reading & Convo: Mark Nowak "...AGAIN" (w/ Diana Khoi Nguyen)

We are honored to welcome celebrated poet Mark Nowak to White Whale for his newest collection of poetry, ...AGAIN . He will be joined by National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Award-winning poet Mark Nowak returns with a harrowing documentation of the expansive landscape of MAGAmerica.
Told through five abecedarian prose sections, . . . AGAIN is a photo-text commentary on MAGAism in America. In his sobering voice, Nowak captures the depredations of capitalism, the desensitizing regularity of mass shootings, and the extremism that has fueled white nationalism. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection through Donald Trump’s re-election, Nowak chronicles the transformations as the seasons change around him, attempting to make sense of a bitterly divided nation that elected a polarizing figurehead . . . again.

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’s work on poetry by incarcerated writers of the 1970s includes his introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Pr*son Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022) and his essay “Workshops of Abolition: Attica Print Culture and Small Press Poetry,” published in The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020 (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is founding director of the Worker Writers School

DIANA KHOI NGUYEN is a poet and multimedia artist who was born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award. A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

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