Traveling Stanzas
Bringing poetry to everyday lives.
Generously Supported By
About
“Traveling Stanzas reminds us why we fell in love with poetry to begin with, it lights up the darkness of which we have plenty, it brilliantly restores the magic of language and hope and connection.”
Naomi Shihab Nye
Poet, Editor, Songwriter, and Novelist
The mission of Traveling Stanzas is to bring poetry to everyday lives by fostering meaningful conversations and encouraging new voices.
Traveling Stanzas is born from the belief that poetry is for the people. We turn to poetry to give voice to what is troubling us, to honor what we love, to make sense of our lives, to remember our past, and to commemorate what we’ve lost.
From the Italian, stanza means a room—a place to pause. Indeed, the program offers people moments of pause to slow down and reflect on their lives, their communities, and to participate in a shared creative experience.
Our Work
Creative Tools & Experiences
Traveling Stanzas hosts interactive exhibits that unite communities around important topics and facilitate civic dialogues through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry. Our Traveling Stanzas Poetry Makerspace is the first of its kind in the country, and serves as a mobile, interactive exhibit, showcasing the creative works of our diverse and vibrant community.
Community Design & Art
Launched in 2009 as a collaboration between Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and Professor Valora Renicker’s Visual Communication Design students, Traveling Stanzas began as a project that paired poems generated in community writing workshops with graphic designs and disseminated the artwork on public transportation throughout Northeast Ohio. Traveling Stanzas has continued to evolve and innovate, finding new ways to bring poetry to people’s everyday lives.
Outreach & Workshops
The Wick Poetry Center engages individuals and communities in the transformative power of poetry. We’ve facilitated creative and healing conversations nationally and internationally in such sectors of our communities as education, healthcare, literacy centers, libraries, national parks, museums, social service agencies for refugee and immigrant populations, senior centers, and veteran’s organizations.
Collaborative Partnerships
The Wick Poetry Center is proud to collaborate with organizational and institutional partners, moving beyond disciplinary boundaries to offer programs and events that speak to the needs of specific communities. Get involved and learn more by signing up for our digital newsletter.
Featured
Projects
Mobile Makerspace
The Traveling Stanzas Poetry Makerspace is the first of its kind in the country, and serves as a mobile, interactive exhibit, showcasing the creative works of our diverse and vibrant community.
The Traveling Stanzas Poetry Makerspace is a completely refurbished, recreational vehicle donated to the Wick Poetry Center by WKSU. This innovative Poetry Makerspace will give our Traveling Stanzas program wheels and bring our digital expressive writing tools and poetry activities to a diverse range of venues throughout our community, such as schools, libraries, hospitals and community centers.
Mapping Akron
Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, the Mapping Akron community arts project sought to foster creative discussions of home, place, and belonging for residents of Akron, Ohio, through expressive writing and placemaking workshops.
Mapping Akron began with workshops at partner locations including the Akron Art Museum, Summit Artspace, the Summit County Juvenile Detention Facility, and Project Learn, and continued alongside schools, libraries, and community centers throughout the city of Akron.
Dear Ukraine
“Dear Ukraine” is a global community poem that provides a space for individuals around the world to speak to the unfolding atrocities of the war against Ukraine and its people.
In recognition of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Wick Poetry Center announced the installation of the Dear Ukraine global community poem exhibit in the Washington National Cathedral’s Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage. The installation offered visitors an opportunity to view poems from around the world on the chapel walls and to share their voice in response the unfolding atrocities of the war against Ukraine and its people.
Dear Ukraine has collaborated with the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America, the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State University, and Severance Hall to host a benefit performance. The exhibit has also been hosted at Hendrix College in the Windgate Museum and at the Lakewood Public Library.
Writing Across Borders
Writing Across Borders celebrates the diverse cultural identity of the city of Akron and our country through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry.
With a major grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, teaching artists from the Wick Poetry Center have engaged refugee and immigrant populations in the Akron, Ohio community in a cross-cultural, intergenerational conversation through poetry and graphic design and have offered people of all ages to share their voice across the divisions of language, age, and culture. The traveling digital exhibit features poems, illustrations, and videos that showcase refugee resettlement in our communities.
Freedom Story
The Freedom Story community poem was created by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University in celebration of the unveiling of the Now and Forever Windows at the Washington National Cathedral on September 23, 2023. The Cathedral engaged world-renowned visual artist Kerry James Marshall to create the windows and acclaimed poet Elizabeth Alexander to write an original poem, “American Song,” which will be engraved in stone below the windows.
Chautauqua Makerspace
The Chautauqua Poetry Makerspace was created in partnership between Chautauqua Literary Arts and the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas at Kent State University. The makerspace has been a unique staple of the Chautauqua Literary Arts program. Throughout the summer season, any visitor can flex their creative muscles and make a poem.
The Chautauqua Poetry Makerspace is made possible through philanthropic support, with special appreciation to Kate Dillon Hogan in memory of James A. Hogan.
Light Enters the Grove
In collaboration with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and the Conservancy for CVNP, the Wick Poetry Center launched the CVNP Poetic Inventory, a digital project mapping species in the national park, along with a permanent, interactive Stanza Wall exhibit inside the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Visitor’s Center.
Following the installation, editors Charles Malone, Carrie George, and Jason Harris released Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry, collecting 42 poems, each of which reflects its author’s unique connection to a living organism found within the park.
As a part of the Wick Juniors Summer Writing Camp and Poetic Inventory project, students and community members contributed to a community poem called “The valley,” based on the poem by Jean Valentine and selected by the 24th United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón to be installed in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Limón visited the Wick Juniors Camp for a reading and discussion.
Big Read Northeast Ohio
Big Read: American Sunrise was an interactive online poetry project featuring Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise, curated by Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson.
Kent State University was pleased to collaborate with the Massillon Museum to present parallel NEA Big Read projects to host a poetry reading featuring Joy Harjo.
River Stanzas
River Stanzas: A Collective Dreaming of the Cuyahoga opened at the KSU Downtown Gallery in 2019 to dream the next 50 years of the Cuyahoga River.
Beginning in July 2018, the Wick Poetry Center conducted a series of intergenerational community forums and conversations around the value of the river in our lives, its history, and our shared future. In collaboration with the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park and the Akron and Kent Public Schools, Wick Poetry Center’s outreach team lead field trips and workshops—“river walks” and “river talks”—aiming to bring the river to the city, and the people of the city to the river. They were inspired to “dream the river” in its next 50 years.
Armed with Our Voices
In May 1970 at Kent State University, four students were killed and nine were wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen during a non-violent protest against the Vietnam War. Honoring the 50th anniversary of the May 4 tragedy in 2020, the Wick Poetry Center, with the May 4 Visitors Center and its partners, developed an interactive exhibit, encouraging visitors to explore the history of student protest and the timely themes of peace and conflict transformation. The exhibit is a simple, adaptable pop-up “pinwheel” experience that engages visitors by drawing them into what happened at Kent State on May 4, 1970, and why it matters today.
Gallery & Map
The gallery & map is a collection of Traveling Stanzas artworks and poems launched in 2009.
History
“Wick’s project is poetry’s platform, one that has the potential to bring people together through the arts.”
Victoria Rogers
Former Vice President of Arts, Knight Foundation
Launched in 2009 as a collaboration between Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and Professor Valora Renicker’s Visual Communication Design students, Traveling Stanzas began as a project that paired poems generated in community writing workshops with graphic designs and disseminated the artwork on public transportation throughout Northeast Ohio.
From its inception, Traveling Stanzas has continued to evolve and innovate, finding new ways to bring poetry to people’s everyday lives, facilitating creative and healing conversations nationally and internationally in such sectors of our communities as education, healthcare, literacy centers, libraries, national parks, museums, social service agencies for refugee and immigrant populations, senior centers, and veteran’s organizations.
Traveling Stanzas have been translated into numerous languages, exhibited in locations around the world, including at the March for Science on the National Mall in Washington D.C., at The Universe in Verse reading in Brooklyn, at the Tuscan AngloAmerican Festival in Florence, Italy, a multinational War Memorial in Lyon, France, and a holiday market in Slovakia.
Now through a suite of creative tools, in both digital and analog form, as well as a system for viewing and disseminating community voices, Traveling Stanzas offers poetry as a means for people of all ages and backgrounds to engage in a deeper and more meaningful conversation with themselves and each other, promoting cross-cultural understanding and empathy.