Arts & Culture

The performance, titled “What We Learned While Alone: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic,’’ will have its opening night at 7 p.m. Oct. 24, in the 700-seat auditorium of the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C. 

Using poetry to explore Akron, Ohio residents’ sense of belonging to their neighborhoods is the goal of a new project by Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center. 

Every Friday, the Kent State community can come together to create poetry and share a more vulnerable side of themselves at the Wick Poetry Center. The Wick Weekly poetry writing workshop brings students together to help develop them as poets and create a community of creatives.

Kent State University at Trumbull is opening the Hart’s School of Performing Arts in October. Shiloh Hart was featured on WKBN for starting an eight-week program for high school students searching for knowledge and experience in the performing arts.

You’ve probably seen someone knitting a scarf or a sweater as a hobby. However, knitting is big business and has a large impact on manufacturing. Kent State School of Fashion professors are using a new $236,816 grant from the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE) to spread awareness of the possibilities of knitting and creating training opportunities.

Kent State was more than 100 miles away from Philip Middleton Williams’ high school and his home in Perrysburg, but the May 4, 1970, shootings, which killed four students and wounded nine, reverberated through his psyche and brought the Vietnam War front and center. Williams was inspired by the May 4 events to write and produce a play "The Sugar Ridge Rag." 

When he’s not working to keep the Kent Campus safe, police officer Vance Voyles can be found in the classroom where he works as an adjunct professor teaching Story for Film for the digital media production major in the School of Media and Journalism within the College of Communication and Information. 

The Reinberger Children’s Library Center at Kent State University has become the new home of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, assuming the role formerly held by the Center for Children’s Books at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Established in 1982, the annual award of $5,000 goes to an author of an historical fiction novel for children published in the previous year and set in South, Central or North America.

Born from inside Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center, “Dear Vaccine” gives citizens a chance to process the pandemic through poetry. The poetry center collaborated with the University of Arizona to expand on poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Dear Vaccine.” The poem became a catalyst for respondents around the world to share their own poems.

The School of Fashion announces the return of its acclaimed in-person Fashion Show, April 28-30, 2022, in Rockwell Hall on the Kent Campus. The presenting sponsor of the 2022 show is renowned American department store, Dillard’s Inc. Dillard’s is a long-time supporter of the School of Fashion, and the Dillard family was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2019.