Community Initiatives
In January 2024 the Stadler Center welcomed its first Outreach & Publicity Manager, Jessica Nirvana Ram, a poet and alumna of the Stadler Fellowship program. This full-time staff position signifies a renewed commitment on the Center's part to promoting poetry and the literary arts in the Susquehanna Valley community.
Jessica is the mastermind behind the Stadler Center's brand new National Poetry Month Project, which brings a cadre of Stadler Center staff members and Bucknell students to Lewisburg Area School District classrooms to teach lessons in writing poetry during the month of April. Jessica, Stadler Center Director Joe Scapellato, and their team of twelve student volunteers covered every classroom in which English is taught, from first grade through high school—a total of 79 classes. One student from each grade was selected to read their poem aloud in a community poetry reading in Bucknell Hall at the end of the month. The National Poetry Month Project was a smashing success, and we look forward to establishing it as an annual event.
Together with Bucknell's Samek Art Museum and guest curator Gary Sojka, the Center hosted Continuing Creativity, a multimedia arts collaboration celebrating the poetry and artwork of senior members of the local community. The program included a poetry reading staged at the Campus Theatre and an art exhibit at the Samek Museum's downtown gallery.
The Center's inaugural Susquehanna Valley Voices reading in March presented poet Abby Minor of Aaronsburg and novelist Tyler James Russell of Lewisburg. The reading, which features writers based in Susquehanna Valley communities, took place at Community Zone in downtown Lewisburg. Stay tuned for an announcement on the next SVV reading, which will take place in Spring 2025.
Other recent community-centered activities include co-sponsorship of the Lewisburg Poet Laureate Program, an initiative of local nonprofit Lewisburg Neighborhoods; maintenance of the Bucknell Poetry Path in downtown Lewisburg and the Linntown Intermediate School Poetry Path; nature-writing workshops for children; collaboration with the Lewisburg Arts Council to bring poetry to Lewisburg's annual Celebration of the Arts; a workshop for the incarcerated at SCI Muncy, a local correctional facility; and contributions to WPSU's statewide student poetry contest and regional Poetry Out Loud competitions.
The Stadler Center is grateful to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and donors for funding that makes our community outreach programs possible.