Nicholas Joe Howard Coles (born 1947 in Leeds, England) is a British-American scholar in working-class literature and composition studies, and is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh.[1]
Life edit
He holds BA and MA degrees from Oxford University (Coles was educated at Balliol College, where he was awarded a first-class undergraduate degree), and he holds MA and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His 1981 PhD dissertation was titlede The Making of a Monster: The Working Class in the Industrial Novels and Social Investigations of 1830–1855.
He wrote and taught about literacy, pedagogy, contemporary poetry, and teacher-research. His best-known book, Working Classics (1990), co-edited with Peter Oresick, was the first to highlight a seldom acknowledged working-class presence within contemporary American poetry.[2]
In the 1990s he was also field director of the National Writing Project, based at the University of California at Berkeley. Until 2002 he directed the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, working to improve students’ writing and academic performance in K-12 schools.
Family edit
Coles's father, John Howard Coles, was a solicitor in Leeds, U.K., and co-founded the Leeds law firm Walker Morris [2]. Coles has lived in the United States since 1972 and is currently a citizen. He has lived in Buffalo, N.Y., Boulder, Colo., and primarily in Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1990 he separated from his ex-wife and the mother of his elder son. For 20 years he lived with psychotherapist, author, and painter Jennifer Matesa and their son, Jonathan Coles [3], in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Works edit
- Nicholas Coles; Peter Oresick, eds. (1995). For a living: the poetry of work. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06410-4.
- Peter Oresick; Nicholas Coles, eds. (1990). Working classics: poems on industrial life. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06133-2.
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- Nicholas Coles; Janet Zandy, eds. (2007). American working-class literature: an anthology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514456-7.