Mark Nowak's multidisciplinary work includes publications in anthropology, poetry/poetics, cultural studies, and photography. He is editor of the journal Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics which in recent years has brought into print new works by writers and artists such as Amiri Baraka, Lila Abu-Lughod, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Diane Glancy, Kamau Brathwaite, and Gerald Vizenor. Special features of Xcp to date have included issues on Multilingual & Translated Poetries, History/In/Heritance, Fieldnotes & Notebooks, Voyage/Voyageur/Voyeur, and Dia/Logos: Speaking Across.

Nowak is also editor of Theodore Enslin's Then, and Now: Selected Poems, 1943-1993 (National Poetry Foundation) and co-editor (with Diane Glancy) of Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours (Coffee House Press ). A collection of Nowak's poems and ethnographic writings is scheduled to be published by Coffee House Press in 2000, and work from this volume has appeared in over thirty literary journals and anthologies, including: American Anthropologist, An Anthology of (New) American Poets, Another Chicago Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, Northwest Review, Puerto del Sol, Qualitative Inquiry, Talisman, Writers Forum, & etc. Nowak has read and performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the 1998 American Studies Conference, Eliot Bay Bookstore (Seattle), the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver), Hungry Mind Bookstore(Mpls.), the Walker Art Center, New York University's Department of Performance Studies, and elsewhere. Currently, Nowak is an Associate Professor of Humanities at the College of St. Catherine, where he teaches courses in Creative Writing, Folklore, and Documentary Studies.