Students and faculty from the Stadler Center will lead the poetry workshops in every Lewisburg Area school, culminating with a May 1 Bucknell Hall student poetry reading.
LEWISBURG, Pa. — Students and faculty from Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts will be visiting every school in the Lewisburg Area School District to offer engaging, generative poetry workshops to students in celebration of April’s National Poetry Month.
A dozen Bucknell undergraduates will be leading the workshops throughout the month, accompanied by Jessica Nirvana Ram, Stadler Center publicity & outreach manager; and Bucknell Director of the Arts and Professor Joe Scapellato, English, director of the Stadler Center. The group will visit every classroom from first grade through 12th grade.
After all the workshops have been completed, interested Lewisburg Area students will have the opportunity to submit their original poems to the Stadler Center faculty and students. One student from each grade level will then be selected and invited to read their poetry to an audience during a free, public event on Wednesday, May 1, at 5 p.m. in Bucknell Hall, home to the Stadler Center.
“We’re training 12 Bucknell students to teach a poetry lesson in every grade in the school district,” Scapellato says. “We’ll all be helping the local students learn to write poems, and then we’ll be providing them with the opportunity to submit them to us for a chance to read aloud at the Bucknell Hall public event.”
The Stadler Center seeks to foster an appreciation for the diversity and richness of contemporary poetry and other literary arts in the Lewisburg Area students.
“Our goal is to get poetry into the community, and this feels like a concrete way to do that,” says Ram. “All of the teachers we’ve been in touch with are super excited and want to get involved.”
Ram and Scapellato would like to make the Stadler Center’s National Poetry Month Project with Lewisburg Area schools an annual event in hopes of inspiring future young poets.
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CONTACTS: Jessica Nirvana Ram, 570-577-1455, jessica.nirvana.ram@bucknell.edu; Joe Scapellato, 570-577-1026, joe.scapellato@bucknell.edu; Mike Ferlazzo, 570-577-3212, 570-238-6266 (c), mike.ferlazzo@bucknell.edu