Advisory Board
Eli C. Goldblatt
Eli C. Goldblatt was born in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up on Army posts in the U.S. and Germany. After earning his B.A. at Cornell University and working in farming, manufacture, and carpentry jobs, he attended Case-Western Reserve Medical School in 1975-76. He taught science, math, and English for six years in an urban alternative high school in Philadelphia, traveled in Mexico and Central America in 1980, and received an M. Ed. and certification in biology from Temple in 1982. He finished both an M.A. in literature (1984) and a Ph.D. in composition studies (1990) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently the Director of First-Year Writing and an associate professor of English at Temple University. He also directs New City Writing, the neighborhood outreach arm of the writing program. NCW supports students working with Open Borders Project, a technology and language learning center in Latino North Philadelphia, as well as Tree House Books, a literacy/literature center near the Temple campus, and the four K-8 Temple Partnership Schools.
Goldblatt works both as a composition/literacy researcher and as a creative writer. In composition, his focus in Round My Way: Authority and Double Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) was on authority in writing, but in recent years he has published on literacy autobiography and community-based learning. His essay "Alinsky's Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects" won the 2005 Ohmann Award in College English. He expands the theme in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P 2007). His poems have appeared over the last thirty years in many small literary journals, most recently in magazines such as Cincinnati Review, Hambone, Paper Air, Another Chicago Magazine, Madison Review, Louisiana Literature, and Hubbub. His books of poems include Journeyman's Song (Coffee House, 1990), Sessions 1-62 (Chax Press, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax Press, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse Press, 2001). In addition, Goldblatt published two children's books, Leo Loves Round and Lissa and the Moon's Sheep, both from Harbinger House in 1990.
Mark Lyons
Mark Lyons is co-director of the Philadelphia Storytelling Project, which uses digital storytelling in their work with teens and adult learners in summer workshops, computer courses and ESL classes. Participants write stories or interview others about their immigrant experience, record, edit and mix their stories, and create short audio stories. He also does workshops with teachers on doing community oral histories. He is the co-editor of Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Families, which is published in Spanish and English.
He has worked in the Latino community for the last twenty-five years, as a health worker and community organizer. For eight years he was the director of the Farmworkers Health and Safety Institute, a consortium of grass-roots organizations in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The Institute trained farmworkers to use theater and other popular education methods to train other farmworkers concerning health and safety issues such as pesticides, field sanitation, housing, drinking water, HIV/AIDS and workers' rights. He also worked for several years in a community health center, as a provider and health planner.
Mark is also a fiction writer who has published several short stories and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is a recipient of Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowships for 2003 and 2009, and the J.P. McGrath Memorial Award from Whetstone Magazine.
