About the group
In 1977, a group of longshoremen and ship’s clerks in San Francisco and Oakland organized themselves into the Waterfront Writers and Artists (WWA), a collective of working-class poets, photographers, illustrators, video documentarians, and sound artists. Over the next five years or so, the group produced a significant body of creative work and gave public readings across the western United States and Canada. Their artistic output, collected here for the first time, grapples with labor politics and worker sociality on the docks, the impact of heavy industry on Bay Area landscapes, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union experience, and the globalization of shipping, among other topics.[+ additional context]
The Waterfront Writers and Artists in 1979. From left: Mike Vawter, George Benet, Norm Young, Charley Hanson, Herb Mills, Ken Fox, Gene (Dennis) Vrana, Max Mallia, Brian Nelson, and Robert Carson.
About the archive
In 2025, the WWA archive was acquired by The Bancroft Library, the special collections library at the University of California, Berkeley. The collection includes all of the writing produced by the group plus solo-authored work by group members, in addition to photographs, film recordings, and many hours of audio, including recordings of group performances. It contains as well transcripts of oral history interviews with group members, which were conducted from 2018-2022. This website serves as an online home for the archive, providing information about the group and digital access to selected works from the collection. To view the archive in its entirety, plan a visit to The Bancroft.For more information, see:
- ◦ The Online Archive of California listing for the Waterfront Writers and Artists archive at The Bancroft Library, which describes the collection in detail. [COMING SOON]
- ◦ Alexis Madrigal’s podcast, CONTAINERS. The WWA is featured in Episode 7, “The Lost Docks.”
- ◦ The credits page.