Leadership
Steve Parks, Executive Director
Steve Parks is the Founder and Executive Director of New City Community Press as well as an Associate Professor of Writing at Syracuse University. He has published two books, Class Politics: The Students' Right To Their Own Language (NCTE, 2000) and Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love (Syracuse University Press, 2010).
His motivation for New City Press, however, emerged from his work with the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP), a network of working class writing/publishing groups in the United Kingdom. Over the course of 30 years, the FWWCP worked with hundreds of community writing groups and helped to distribute over three million community publications. In the process, the FWWCP helped to redefine what voices and stories should be considered valuable in a community or a classroom.
For the past 10 years, Parks has been working to recreate this network of writing groups and publication projects in Philadelphia, and, now Syracuse, with the belief that "everyone is an author, but not everyone has the position of an author." New City Community Press is his attempt to open up writing to everyday voices and, by doing so, empower these individual and collectives in their efforts to improve the future of their neighborhoods.
Eliot Shorr-Parks, Associate Director
Eliot Shorr-Parks has worked for the past two years at New City Community Press, most recently overseeing the creation of an imprint series focused on the role of sports in the community. His first book, More Than A Game: Life Lessons from Philadelphia Sports, features interviews with community and professional athletes, such as Leonard Weaver, Mike Richards, Sonny Hill, Rueban Amaro Jr, Joe Banner, Carlos Ruiz, Chris Pronger, and Ed Rendell. Currently, he is working on a history of Jim Ellis and the "PDR" swim team. He has a degree in Sports Journalism from Temple University.
