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Kent State's Wick Poetry Center wins Knight Foundation Grant for Poetry Wall

Ideastream Public Media | By Mitch Felan,
Tyler Thompson
Published July 12, 2018 at 7:15 PM EDT
This rendering shows what the proposed listening wall could look like.
The Wick Poetry Center
/
Kent State University
This rendering shows what the proposed listening wall could look like.

The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University is getting $50,000 to help make poetry more interactive.

The center is using a grant from the Knight Foundation Art and Technology Prototype Fund to create what it calls the Traveling Stanzas Listening Wall.

The center’s director, David Hassler, said the mobile touch-screen wall will allow visitors to listen to excerpts from the Kent State Shootings Oral Histories Project archives, choose words from the transcripts and record their own sound poems.

“This listening wall becomes a permeable and interactive space to bring people together in a creative conversation as opposed to divide them, and I think that we can find a shared humanity and some common ground in our essential human experiences,” he said.

The Wick Poetry Center is one of 12 organizations in the U.S to receive one of these grants.

The fund is focused on helping cultural groups better integrate technology.

Copyright 2021 WKSU. To see more, visit WKSU.

WKSU Stories
Mitch Felan
Mitch Felan is a news intern for WKSU. He is a multimedia journalist with experience in print, television, radio and visual journalism. Felan is a junior at Kent State University, working towards a Bachelor's Degree in Multimedia Journalism. During the school year, Felan works for Kent State Student Media in TV2, The Kent Stater, and KentWired. He will be serving as the Digital Director for Kent State University's Student Media Newsroom in the Fall.
See stories by Mitch Felan
Tyler Thompson
Tyler Thompson was a reporter and on-air host for 89.7 NPR News. Thompson, originally from northeast Ohio, has spent the last three years working as a Morning Edition host and reporter at NPR member station KDLG Public Radio and reporter at the Bristol Bay Times Newspaper in Dillingham, Alaska.
See stories by Tyler Thompson