On Aug. 4, 2015, student poets in the Wick Juniors Summer
Writing Club gave a reading in the Wick Poetry Park located
on the Lefton Esplanade at Kent State University. The
university’s Wick Poetry Center recently received two
grants from the Ohio Arts Council.

The Wick Poetry Center, in Kent State University’s College of Arts and Sciences, recently received two grants from the Ohio Arts Council. The grants, totaling $28,368, will help support the Wick reading series, student scholarships, poetry publications, outreach workshops and the Traveling Stanzas project.

The $14,410 Ohio Arts Council Sustainability grant, renewable for four years, provides general operating support to the state’s arts and cultural organizations that make important contributions to the health and vitality of our communities.

According to the Ohio Arts Council, “Sustainability grants ensure that public support of the arts continues to play an integral role in celebrating the rich past and sustaining the vibrant future of Ohio’s cultural legacy through flexible and reliable funding for annual arts programming.”

“We’re thrilled to receive the sustainability grant because it indicates that the Ohio Arts Council thinks that what Wick is doing is valuable to the Northeast Ohio community and beyond,” says Jessica Jewell, assistant director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State.

The $13,958 Ohio Arts Council Arts Partnership grant will support the center’s Traveling Stanzas project. The project is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project between the Wick Poetry Center and student graphic designers and illustrators at Kent State, aimed at serving communities locally, nationally and internationally.

“Due to the tremendous success of our Traveling Stanzas project, bolstered by the ongoing support of the Ohio Arts Council, this grant will allow us to continue to encourage global voices across languages and cultures by creating an interactive Traveling Stanzas website and traveling exhibit, launching in 2015,” says David Hassler, director of Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center. “The evolution of our Traveling Stanzas project will allow people to share poems across the division of language and culture, to make connections with others and to discover a shared humanity through the intimate voice of poetry.”

For more information about Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center, visit www.kent.edu/wick.

For more information about the Ohio Arts Council, visit www.oac.ohio.gov.