John Bowe (author)

John Bowe (born 1964 in Minnesota) is an American author. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times. He has also written for The New Yorker, The American Prospect, GQ, McSweeney's, and This American Life. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Basquiat with Julian Schnabel.

Early life and education

He graduated from Minneapolis' Blake School in 1982, obtained an honors BA in English from the University of Minnesota in 1987 and earned an MFA in film from the Columbia University School of the Arts in 1996.

Americans Talk About Love

Us: Americans Talk About Making Love is a selection of oral histories about relationships. John Bowe collaborated with a team of interviewers and co-editors to record and collect the love stories of a diverse range of U.S citizens.

Nobodies

Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy is an examination of modern slavery in the United States, focusing particularly upon the widening gap between rich and poor, both in the US and globally, and what this means for notions of freedom in an era of “free trade”.

"Nobodies" first started as an article by John Bowe published in 2003 for both The New Yorker [1] and The Wall Street Journal.[2] Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor And the Dark Side of the New Global Economy was turned into a book and published in September 2007.

This book follows Bowe's journey and dangerous research, exclusive interviews, and eyewitness accounts; Nobodies takes readers inside three illegal workplaces where foreign employees are enslaved. This book exposes the corporate duplicity, subcontracting and immigration fraud, and moral sleights of hand that allow forced labor to continue in the United States.

Bowe starts by telling the tale of those living in the fields of Immokalee, Florida where underpaid or unpaid undocumented workers pick the produce that feeds the supply chains of companies such as Pepsi Company and Tropicana. Secondly, Bowe travels to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the John Pickle Company exploited temporary workers imported from India to boost profits while making pressure tanks used by oil refineries and power plants. Lastly, in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth, Bowe documents an economy built upon guest workers, where 90 percent of the female population work sixty-hour weeks for $3.05 an hour and spend weekends trying to trade sex for green cards.

Nobodies was named one of the best twenty books of 2007 by Village Voice.

Bowe appeared on The Daily Show on September 24, 2007 to talk about Nobodies.

Gig

Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, co-authored with Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, is an oral history based on Studs Terkel’s Working, offering a collection of 126 interviews from rich to poor, giving voice to the American labor force.

Awards

John Bowe is a recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award[3] the Sydney Hillman Award for journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good, the Richard J. Margolis Award, dedicated to journalism that combines social concern and humor, and the Harry Chapin Media Award[4] for reportage of hunger- and poverty-related issues.

References
  1. "Nobodies". Retrieved 21 December 2016.
  2. Bowe, John (14 September 2007). "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor And the Dark Side of the New Global Economy". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
  3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2011-07-10. Retrieved 2011-07-10.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. "Harry Chapin Media Award finalists announced". Archived from the original on 2010-06-26.
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