NEA Grant for PCCC Poetry Center

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College (PCCC) has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

With this funding, the Poetry Center will provide free poetry workshops to seniors in Passaic County and publish an anthology of their work.

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College is one of 1,145 not-for-profit national, regional, state, and local organizations recommended for a grant as part of the federal agency’s second round of fiscal year 2011 grants. In total, the NEA will distribute more than $88 million to support projects nationwide.

Stanley Kunitz, then Poet Laureate of the United States
and Maria Mazziotti Gillan, talk with a reading attendee

Since the Poetry Center was founded in 1980 by Executive Director Maria Mazziotti Gillan, it has organized quality programs that have brought it to national attention, such as the Paterson Literary Review, four poetry contests, and a cable TV show. The Poetry Center reaches more than one million people annually, and is unique not only because of the number and variety of services it offers, but because of its connection with an urban, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic community.

The Poetry Center was named a Distinguished Arts Project and awarded several Citations of Excellence, and is funded, in part, by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts and by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.