Nicholas Joe Howard Coles (born Nov. 11, 1947 in

Leeds Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England. It is the largest settlement in Yorkshire and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds Metropolitan Borough, which is the second most populous district in the United Kingdom. It is built aro ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

) is a

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

scholar in

working-class The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...

literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...

and

composition studies Composition studies (also referred to as composition and rhetoric, rhetoric and composition, writing studies, or simply composition) is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college leve ...

, and is Professor Emeritus of English at the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

Life

He holds BA and MA degrees from

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

(Coles was educated at

Balliol College Balliol College () is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1263 by nobleman John I de Balliol, it has a claim to be the oldest college in Oxford and the English-speaking world. With a governing body of a master and ar ...

, where he was awarded a first-class undergraduate degree), and he holds MA and

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

degrees from the

State University of New York at Buffalo The State University of New York at Buffalo (commonly referred to as UB, University at Buffalo, and sometimes SUNY Buffalo) is a public research university in Buffalo and Amherst, New York, United States. The university was founded in 1846 a ...

. His 1981 PhD dissertation was titled ''The Making of a Monster: The Working Class in the Industrial Novels and Social Investigations of 1830–1855.'' He wrote and taught about

literacy Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...

pedagogy Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...

, contemporary

poetry Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...

, and teacher-research. His best-known book, '' Working Classics'' (1990), co-edited with Peter Oresick, was the first scholarly work to highlight a seldom acknowledged working-class presence within contemporary American poetry.Oxford University Press website for Nicholas Coles
In the 1990s he was also a field director of the

National Writing Project The National Writing Project (NWP) is a United States professional development network that serves teachers of writing at all grade levels, primary through university, and in all subjects. Unique in breadth and scale, the NWP is a network of sites ...

(NWP). From the late 1980s until 2002 he directed the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, a site of the NWP, working to improve children's writing and academic performance in K-12 schools in the Western Pennsylvania region.

Family

Coles is the eldest of four children. His father, John Howard Coles, was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and served as a solicitor in Leeds, England, having co-founded the law firm Walker Morri

Coles has lived in the United States since 1972 and is a citizen. He has lived in Buffalo, N.Y.; Boulder, Colo.; and primarily in Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1990 he separated from his ex-wife Annie Kraft, the mother of his elder son, in order to establish a relationship with psychotherapist, author, and artist Jennifer Matesa, whom he married in 1994; they had a son, Jono Coles (now an architect).

Works

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coles, Nicholas 1947 births Living people Writers from Pittsburgh University of Pittsburgh faculty Working-class literature