Nicholas Coles

Nicholas Joe Howard Coles (born Nov. 11, 1947 in Leeds, England) is a British-American scholar in working-class literature and composition studies, and is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Life He holds BA and MA degrees from Oxford University (Coles was educated at Balliol College, where he was awarded a first-class undergraduate degree), and he holds MA and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo. 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, pedagogy, contemporary poetry, 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.

In the 1990s he was also a field director of the National Writing Project (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 Morris . 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