Join us in honor of National Nurses Week 2020 (May 6, 2020) for a special Virtual AWP: Writers in Conversation & Reading event with David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. He is joined by Katie Daley, a teaching artist for the Wick Poetry Center, Dr. Mary K. Anthony, professor and associate dean for research at Kent State University College of Nursing, and Taryn Burhanna, RN. In this conversation they share their work on the “Some Days” Community Poem Project, a prompt scripted from the Wick Poetry Center in partnership with Kent State University. 

The focus of the “Some Days” community poem project was to work with health care providers in Northeast Ohio to create a “community poem” that reflected on their experiences as health care providers.  In these pandemic times of COVID-19, “Some Days” shows us the resilience, stresses, and guiding values of health care providers as they use the lens of poetry to capture and reflect on their many experiences of caregiving.  Listen in to the discoveries made through this communal creative process.

Learn more about the “Some Days” Community Poem Project by joining the watch party at AWP Community of Writers Facebook Group, Monday, May 11, 2020, at 3:00 p.m. ET, where David Hassler will be available to answer questions after the conversation. Share your voice by contributing to future Traveling Stanzas projects with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. The conversation will also be available on the AWP YouTube Channel.

David Hassler directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, which is home to the award-winning Traveling Stanzas project. He is the author or editor of nine books of poetry and nonfiction, including Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, for which he was awarded Ohio Poet of the Year 2006. His play, May 4th Voices, was published in 2013 by the Kent State University Press along with a teacher’s resource book. A filmed version of the play, which he co-produced, received the 2014 Oral History Association’s Nonprint Format Award, and it was produced as a one-hour radio play for PRX by WKSU for the 50th commemoration of the May 4 shootings in 2020. With photographer Gary Harwood he is the author of the documentary book, Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community, which received the Ohioana Book Award and the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award and was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award.

Katie Daley has performed her monologues and word music across North America in theaters, nightclubs, ballrooms, and bistros. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various journals and anthologies, and her writing has won her two Individual Creativity Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. As a teaching artist for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, she currently does community outreach in expressive and therapeutic writing.

Dr. Mary K. Anthony serves as professor and associate dean for research at Kent State University College of Nursing and holds an appointment as director of nursing research with University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. She has more than 60 widely cited publications in journals and books. Her patient-centered research examines how nursing care delivery processes such as delegation, hospital discharge, communication, leadership, and interruptions affect patient outcomes. Her studies have been funded by federal, professional, and international sources. Dr. Anthony obtained her BSN from St. John College in Cleveland and her MSN and PhD degrees from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University.

Taryn Burhanna is a registered nurse with 10 years’ experience including stroke and cardiac stepdown nursing. She became an adult gerontology nurse practitioner in 2018 and joined the faculty of KSU’s College of Nursing that same year.  She is humbled and honored to be able to serve the community through her various working roles, including providing primary care at AxessPointe Community Health Centers and providing lecture, inpatient, and community health nursing instruction at KSU’s College of Nursing to future generations of nurses.