Quantcast
  Thursday - December 18th, 2025
Newsbreak
×

What can we help you find?

Open Menu

Midwest Writing Center Receives $10,000 Emergency Poetry Grant

The Rock Island-based Midwest Writing Center is proud to announce receiving a $10,000 emergency operations grant from the national Poetry Foundation. These funds will be used to create and maintain accessible programming throughout the Covid pandemic.

Midwest Writing Center Receives $10,000 Emergency Poetry Grant

The Rock Island-based Midwest Writing Center has received a $10,000 grant from the Poetry Foundation.

The Poetry Foundation opened an emergency grant program to support poetry and affiliated art organizations struggling during the pandemic, as an extension of its commitment to community in June 2020. The Foundation committed $1 million in emergency grants over two years at that time, and can now report this has doubled to $2 million in emergency funds distributed within one year.

The emergency grants were open to poetry organizations and organizations that use poetry as an expression of their missions, located in the United States. This included organizations fighting for social justice and working to advance racial equity in

poetry and affiliated art.

A total of 128 organizations nationwide received emergency grant funding from the Poetry Foundation from the emergency grant opportunity.

Sarah Elgatian, MWC marketing and program specialist, said they’ll use their funding “to supplement our programming so that we can continue to do our work in a hybrid and online format and we’ll be able to add some more poetry-focused programming in the near future (but we can’t announce details yet).

“The grant is for operations, which will allow us to keep working the extra hours required of staff to make Covid-proof, accessible programming,” she said by e-mail this week. “We’re super excited.”

For more information on the center, visit www.mwcqc.org.

Midwest Writing Center Receives $10,000 Emergency Poetry Grant

Free Breaking News
Alerts & Daily Digest
In Your Inbox!

Advertisement
Jonathan Turner -- who has called the Quad Cities home since 1995 -- has decades of experience as a professional journalist and pianist. His experience writing for daily newspapers, public radio and local TV encompasses a wide range of subjects, including the arts, politics, education, economic development, historic preservation, business, and tourism.
Jonathan most loves writing about music and the arts (which he now does as a freelancer for the River Cities Reader and Visit Quad Cities). He has a passion for accompanying musicals, singers, choirs and instrumentalists, including playing for QC Music Guild's 2023 productions of RENT and SWEENEY TODD. He is assistant music director and accompanist for the spring 2025 Music Guild show, ESCAPE TO MARGARITAVILLE. He wrote an original musical based on The Book of Job, which premiered at Playcrafters in 2010. Jonathan penned a 175-page history book about downtown Davenport, that was published by The History Press in 2016, and a travel guide about the QC published by Reedy Press in 2022.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

QuadCities.com Podcast Hub - Local Podcasts

Today’s Most Popular Articles