Pop-up online poetry studios.

SOCIAL POETICS.

Social Poetics Studios are pop-up workshops guided by documentary poet Mark Nowak that foreground poetry as a form of cultural engagement with everyday life and collective struggle. Drawing on Nowak’s work with workers, unions, and community groups around the world, these studios treat writing as a tool for witnessing conditions of labor, shared experience, and the forces shaping our social worlds rather than as a means of personal expression alone.

Poetry as a public practice—writing to examine history, labor, and the conditions shaping everyday life.

Participants explore readings and practice writing that responds to lived realities, attends to histories often marginalized in mainstream literary spaces, and opens possibilities for new forms of recognition and connection. The emphasis is on attentive listening, thoughtful revision, and the social dimensions of poetic practice — creating space for inquiry, testimony, and creative resonance that can circulate beyond the page into other spheres of life and collective action. 

UPCOMING STUDIOS

  • On 7 February, the Ed Factory hosts Worker Writers School’s Anti-Haiku Workshop #2 with poetsMark Nowak, JosePadua, Christine YvetteLewis, and EileenTabios.

    Participants will explore the radical history of haiku, read works by Issa, Sonia Sanchez, and Tabios, and write sharp three-line poems for public circulation—signs, posts, placards, pizza boxes, and social media—while raising funds for Minneapolis organizations.

  • Experience optional.

    In this studio, we examine the radical lineage of haiku through readings by Issa, Sonia Sanchez, and Eileen Tabios, then write three-line poems intended for circulation—posters, placards, pizza boxes, and social media—where language meets collective action.

  • Saturday, 7 February, 2026

    1:30 - 3:00 pm EST (all times Eastern)

    Live + online via Zoom

  • A Zoom link will be provided upon registration.

  • This Social Poetics Studio is free and all writers are donating their time to raise funds for Minneapolis organizations and families.

Anti-ICE Haiku Workshop #2

A collective writing studio treating the three-line poem as a tool for refusal, solidarity, and public speech—working with special guest documentary poets to write haiku for streets, signs, and shared platforms.

Saturday, 7 February 2026.

Free, live, + online. Register for the Zoom link.

REGISTER FOR ANTI-ICE #2

  • The Ed Factory hosts this Worker Writers School poetry studio tracing the radical history and practice of haiku.

    Special Guests:

    Faisal Mohyuddin, author of Elsewhere: An Elegy and the haiku, “Liberation Haiku.”

    Lorraine Garrett, included in Coronavirus Haiku by the Worker Writers School poets.

  • Explore Amiri Baraka’s “Low Coup,” incarcerated Black Arts Movement writers, and interned Japanese-American poets to study the radical history and practice of haiku and use them to design three-line poems for signs, banners, placards, flyers, and social media.

  • Saturday, 31 January, 2026

    1:00-2:00 pm EST (all times Eastern)

    Live and online. Register for the Zoom link.

  • This is a small-group, live online workshop held on Zoom. Participants are encouraged to join from a quiet, private space with a reliable internet connection, using a laptop or desktop computer.

  • This Social Poetics Studio is free and all writers are donating their time to raise funds for Minneapolis organizations and families.

Anti-ICE Haiku Workshop #1

A one-day studio focused on redaction writing practices that reveal the essences and contradictions in school and civic texts.

Facilitator: documentary poet Mark Nowak.

Special Guests: Faisal Mohyuddin, “Liberation Haiku” and Lorraine Garrett, Worker Writers School

Saturday, 31 January 2026

Free, live, + online. Register for the Zoom link.

REGISTER FOR ANTI-ICE #1