Nicholas Coles

Nicholas Joe Howard Coles (born 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 titlede 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 to highlight a seldom acknowledged working-class presence within contemporary American poetry.

In the 1990s he was also field director of the National Writing Project, based at the University of California at Berkeley. Until 2002 he directed the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, working to improve students’ writing and academic performance in K-12 schools.

Family
Coles's father, John Howard Coles, was a solicitor in Leeds, U.K., and co-founded the Leeds law firm Walker Morris. Coles has lived in the United States since 1972 and is currently a citizen. He has lived in Buffalo, N.Y., Boulder, Colo., and primarily in Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1990 he separated from his ex-wife and the mother of his elder son. For 20 years he lived with psychotherapist, author, and painter Jennifer Matesa and their son, Jonathan Coles, in Pittsburgh, Pa.