Mark Lyons

Mark Lyons wrote Homing, a memoir about growing up as a teen in a household where he lost his mother to mental illness. His collection of short stories, Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines, was chosen as a 2015 Kirkus Book of the Year. He also edited and translated Dreams and Nightmares / Suenos y Pesadillas, a memoir by Liliana Velasquez, who fled Guatemala alone when she was fourteen. The book was First Prize winner in Memoir Magazine’s 2020 competition, and was a finalist in the Young Author division of the 2019 Indie Book Awards. He wrote and translated Espejos y Ventanas / Mirrors and Windows, Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Families. He created a theater piece from this work, which was performed at the Border Book Festival in Mesilla, New Mexico. He was a recipient of Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowships for 2003 and 2009, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice.

As director of the Philadelphia Storytelling Project, Lyons uses digital storytelling in his work with teens, the immigrant community, and homeless veterans. Participants record their stories, mix them with music, and share them on CDs, the radio, webcasts, and public venues. He recently completed a project with immigrant youth who created dolls, recorded stories about their fears of their parents being deported, and implanted their recorded stories into the dolls to create talking StoryDolls. He also worked with undocumented immigrant youth who came across the border by themselves, to create stories about their journey, the family they left behind and their dreams for the future. He produced a series of audio stories on homeless veterans for Project Home in collaboration with the photographer Harvey Finkle. He also does workshops with high school and university teachers on using oral histories to create conversations within and between communities, improve literacy, and give communities a voice.

Lyons has worked in the Latino community for the last twenty five years, as a health worker and community organizer. He was the director of the Farmworkers Health and Safety Institute, a consortium of grass-roots organizations in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The Institute trained farmworkers to use theater and other popular education methods to train other farmworkers concerning health and safety issues and workers’ rights. He also worked for several years in a community health center, as a provider and health planner.

He also edits Open Borders, the Wild River Review series of immigrant stories.