Staff

Director
 

David Hassler is the author of two books of poems, including Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, for which he was awarded Ohio Poet of the Year 2006. He is the author of several nonfiction books as well, most recently the play, May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970 based on the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project (The Kent State University Press, 2013). With photographer Gary Harwood, he is the author of Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community, which received the Ohioana Book Award, the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award, and was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award. He is coeditor of two anthologies by the University of Iowa Press, Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School, as well as A Place to Grow: Voices and Images of Urban Gardeners. He received a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Bowling Green State University. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, DoubleTake/Points of Entry, Indiana Review, and other journals. He speaks widely at state and national conferences on issues of poetry and education.

Sr. Director, Academic Programs

Jessica Jewell is the author of three collections of poetry including Slap Leather (dancing girl press), Sisi and the Girl from Town (Finishing Line Press) and Dust Runner (Finishing Line Press). She is also an editor of two collections: Speak a Powerful Magic (Kent State University Press) and I Hear the World Sing (Kent State University Press). Jewell is currently the senior academic program director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, where she also earned her PhD in higher education administration and an MFA in poetry. Her academic writing has been published most recently in the Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education and Inside Higher Education. Her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, American Poetry Journal, and Nimrod among others. Jewell lives in northeast Ohio.

Assistant Director, Marketing 

Györgyi Mihályi is the assistant director of marketing at the Wick Poetry Center and International Programs and Education Abroad in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has an M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration with an Internationalization certificate from Kent State University as well as BA in English Literature from the University of Szeged and a BA in Business Administration from Kent State University. She is currently a doctoral student in Higher Education Administration at Kent State. She is originally from Szeged, Hungary. 

Photo credit: Melissa Olson

Program and Outreach Manager

Charles Malone is a Northeastern Ohio native who earned his BA and MA from Kent State before working on his MFA at Colorado State University. While in Colorado, Charlie taught poetry in the schools with Literacy Through Poetry and served on the staff of the Colorado Review and Matter Journal. In collaboration with Wolverine Farm Publishing, Charlie edited the anthology A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park. His writing has appeared in Salfront, Sugar House Review, Phoebe, Harpur Palate, The Laurel Review, Boneshaker, and Permafrost. He is also the author of the chapbook Questions about Circulation from Driftwood Press and the full-length collection Working Hypothesis from Finishing Line Press. 

Mapping Akron Program Coordinator

Carrie George is the Mapping Akron program coordinator at the Wick Poetry Center, where she teaches and develops poetry workshops reimagining place and home. She received an MFA in poetry from Kent State University and the Northeast Ohio MFA Program. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her poetry has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Akron, Ohio, and works as a bookshop associate at Elizabeth's Bookshop & Writing Center. 

Part-Time Faculty

Katie Daley is a writer, performer, and wanderer who keeps circling back to Northeast Ohio. She is the recipient of three fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and has produced three chapbooks and two CDs of her shows. In her passion for bringing poetry to the ear, she has coached several Poetry Out Loud state champions for the national POL tournament and writes and performs spoken-music pieces for Drifters Inn, the band she formed with her husband. She earned her MFA from Western Michigan University and currently teaches in the MFA program at Kent State University. With a focus on the unifying, healing power of expressive writing, she facilitates workshops in community centers, hospital rooms and schools for the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine as well as the Wick Poetry Center.