Mark Pawlak

Mark Pawlak (born 1948 in Buffalo, New York) is a Polish-American poet and educator.

Early years

Mark Pawlak was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1948, into an ethnic Polish working-class family. Buffalo's Polish east-side neighborhoods and the Langfield Housing development, where he lived during most of his grade school years, figure prominently in the poems of his first poetry collection, The Buffalo Sequence. He graduated from Immaculate Heart of Mary School and then attended Kensington High School. He completed is secondary education at Maryvale Senior High School, in Cheektowaga, New York, a working-class commuter suburb, where his family had moved in the early 1960s. He attend college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he graduated in 1970 with a degree in physics. While at MIT, he studied poetry with Denise Levertov. Poetry has been an integral part of his life and work ever since.

Career

His opposition to the Vietnam War and to Defense Department funding of scientific research lead him to give up a promising career in experimental physics. He became involved in social justice causes and in progressive education. He taught mathematics, sciences, and creative writing, briefly on the west coast at the Santa Barbara Free School. He returned to Cambridge to help start The Group School, an independent alternative high school for poor and working class youth, many of whom were public school truants or drop-outs. In 1978, he took a position teaching mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he continues to teach and to work as an administrator.