For a Living: The Poetry of Work is a literary anthology

Anthology

An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...

 of American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 labor poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 written during the 1980s and 1990s.

The book identifies within American literature

American literature

American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...

 of the current Information Age

Information Age

The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...

 or service economy

Service economy

Service economy can refer to one or both of two recent economic developments. One is the increased importance of the service sector in industrialized economies. Services account for a higher percentage of US GDP than 20 years ago...

 a new work poetry about the nature and culture of nonindustrial work: white collar

White-collar worker

The term white-collar worker refers to a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work, in contrast with a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor...

, pink collar

Pink Collar

Pink Collar is an ABC sitcom which just only pilot episode aired. It stars Alicia Silverstone, Charlotte Ross, Matt Malloy, and Ryan Michelle Bathe. TV-Pilot set in an accident insurance agency, Pink Collar talking about the lives of four woman as they juggle their ambitions, friendships, and...

, domestic, clerical, technical, managerial or professional. The poems cross lines of status, class, and gender and range from mopping floors to television news reporting, Wall Street brokerage, and raising children. The anthology offers nearly two hundred poems by ninety-six poets, most of whom are of the baby boomer

Baby boomer

A baby boomer is a person who was born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom and who grew up during the period between 1946 and 1964. The term "baby boomer" is sometimes used in a cultural context. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus of a precise definition, even...

 generation.

The collection was edited by Nicholas Coles

Nicholas Coles

Nicholas J. H. Coles is a British-American scholar in working-class literature and composition studies, and is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Pittsburgh...

 and Peter Oresick

Peter Oresick

Peter Oresick is an American poet and Associate Professor of English at Chatham University, where he directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program...

, both of the University of Pittsburgh

University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

. It is a companion volume to their critically acclaimed Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life

Working Classics

Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life is a landmark literary anthology of American working-class poetry written during the second half of the 20th century....

, an anthology of blue-collar work poetry. For a Living remains in print since its first publication in 1995 by the University of Illinois Press

University of Illinois Press

The University of Illinois Press , is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic projects...

.

Selected Poets in For a Living

Ai

Ai (poet)

Florence Anthony was a National Book Award winning American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa...

 · Maggie Anderson

Maggie Anderson

Maggie Anderson is an American poet and editor with roots in Appalachia.-Life and career:Anderson attended West Virginia Wesleyan College from 1966–68 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English, with high honors, from West Virginia University in 1970. Her M.A. in English in 1973 and an M.S.W. in...

 · John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

 · Dorothy Barresi

Dorothy Barresi

-Life:She was raised in Akron, Ohio. She teaches in the English Department at California State University at Northridge, where she is Chair of the Creative Writing Program....

 · Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Red Sugar , and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois...

 · Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman is an American poet. She is known as "the L.A. Blueswoman," and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles."-Biography:...

 · Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels

James Raymond Daniels is an American poet and writer.Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English.He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in...

 · Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte is an American poet and a professor of writing at University of Pittsburgh.At Wayne State University she earned a B.A. in 1965 and an M.A...

 · Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady is an American poet focusing largely on matters of race and society, particularly the trials of the African-American race in the United States. His poetry often centers around jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class...

 · Martín Espada

Martín Espada

Martín Espada is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.- Life and career :Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York...

 · Alice Fulton

Alice Fulton

Alice Fulton is an American author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.- Biography :Fulton was born and raised in Troy, New York, the youngest of three daughters. Her father was the proprietor of the historic Phoenix Hotel, and her mother was a visiting nurse. She began writing poetry in high school...

 · Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, author and playwright. She attended the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke and later Nelson Bentley as well as David Wagoner and Mark Strand...

 · Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia

-Poetry:It was as a poet that Gioia first began to attract widespread attention in the early 1980s, with frequent appearances in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In the same period, he published a number of essays and book reviews...

 · Albert Goldbarth

Albert Goldbarth

Albert Goldbarth is an American poet born January 31, 1948 in Chicago. He is known for his prolific production, his gregarious tone, his eclectic interests and his distinctive 'talky' style. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1991 and 2001, the only...

 · Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn

Judy Rae Grahn is an American poet. She has written many lesbian / feminist works.-Activities:Judy Grahn is a poet who writes about women's lives, including lesbian experience. She was a member of the Gay Women's Liberation Group, the first lesbian feminist collective on the west coast, founded...

 · Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published eight books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems , which brings together thirty-five years of work. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial...

 · David Ignatow

David Ignatow

-Life:David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego.-Career:...

 · Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson

Denis Hale Johnson is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus' Son and his novel Tree of Smoke , which won the National Book Award. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.- Biography :...

 · Lawrence Joseph

Lawrence Joseph

Lawrence Joseph is an American poet, writer, essayist, critic, lawyer, and professor of law.-Life:Joseph's grandparents, Lebanese Maronite and Syrian Melkite Eastern Catholics, were among the first Arab Americans to emigrate to Detroit, where both Joseph's parents were born...

 · Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United...

 · Susan Kinsolving

Susan Kinsolving

Susan Kinsolving is an American poet whose books include The White Eyelash, Dailies & Rushes and Among Flowers....

 · Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.-Early Life:...

 · Brad Leithauser

Brad Leithauser

Brad E. Leithauser is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is now on faculty at The...

 · Philip Levine

Philip Levine (poet)

Philip Levine is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well...

 · Thomas Lynch

Thomas Lynch (poet)

Thomas Lynch is an American poet, essayist, and undertaker.-Early life:Lynch was educated by nuns and Christian Brothers at Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Lynch then went to university and mortuary school, from which he graduated in 1973...

 · Campbell McGrath

Campbell McGrath

Campbell McGrath is a notable modern American poet. He is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry, including his most recent, Seven Notebooks , Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition , and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys .- Life :McGrath was born in Chicago, Illinois, and...

 · Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...

 · Ed Ochester

Ed Ochester

Edwin Frank Ochester is an American poet and editor.Born September 15 in Brooklyn, New York, he was educated at Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison....

 · Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds

-Life:Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad...

 · Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University...

 · Louis Simpson

Louis Simpson

Louis Aston Marantz Simpson is an American poet. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At The End Of The Open Road.-Life:...

 · John Updike

John Updike

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....

 · Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer is an American poet and editor.She is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg where she teaches such courses as Intro to Poetry, Nature Writing, World Poetry, and Political Poetry, and co-teaches American Poetry and the Creative Process. Vollmer is co-editor of 5...

 · Tom Wayman

Tom Wayman

Thomas Ethan Wayman is a Canadian poet and academic.Born in Hawkesbury, Ontario, Wayman has lived most of his life in British Columbia. He studied at the University of British Columbia, Colorado State University, and the University of California, Irvine.Wayman has received the Canadian Authors...

 · C. K. Williams

C. K. Williams

Charles Kenneth Williams is an American poet. Senior poet Paul Muldoon has described him as “one of the most distinguished poets of his generation.” -Biography:...

External links

• Look inside For a Living at Google Books