Bringing poetry to 
everyday lives

About the
Project

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.