Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center is receiving more than $30,000 in grants from the Ohio Arts Council, a state agency that supports and funds quality arts. The grants are the latest in a series of grants that the Center has been awarded recently. 

The $31,739 from the Arts Council is split between two different grants. The first award of $22,999 is to be used by the Center to “engage audiences through poetry readings, publications, workshops and scholarship opportunities,” the Council’s website said.

This grant, known as the Sustainability award, will help support all of the Wick Poetry Center’s current projects. One project supported by the new grant is the Center’s award-winning Traveling Stanzas said Jessica Jewell, Wick Poetry Center’s Senior Academic Program Director.

The Traveling Stanzas project was started by the Wick Poetry Center in 2009 with the goal of bringing “poetry to everyday lives by fostering meaningful conversations and encouraging new voices,” the project’s website said. 

The Traveling Stanzas have been shown around the world, including at the March for Science on the National Mall in Washington D.C., the Tuscan AngloAmerican Festival in Florence, Italy, a multinational War Memorial in Lyon, France and a holiday market in Slovakia. 

The second grant received by the Wick Poetry Center is the ArtsNEXT grant. The $8,740 grant will fund the Wick Poetry Center’s latest project “The Listening Wall,” Jewell said. 

“The Listening Wall, which is a May 4 initiative, prompts users to respond to historical documents, oral histories and multimedia stories related to the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings,” Jewell said. “In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the tragic shootings, this immersive, digital experience provides a creative exploration of the relationship between peace and conflict, as well as the growing student activism movements around the world.”

The Wick Poetry Center also won a $50,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in July 2018 to fund The Listening Wall project. 

Brandon Justice is a correspondent. Contact him at [email protected].