Humanities & Arts (HARTS Program)

Dear HARTS Supporters:

Thank you so much for donating to the HARTS Initiative during the Big Give Day campaign. Your support helps us ensure that all PCC students have rich access to the humanities and arts, both inside and outside the classroom.

Despite the pandemic, the HARTS Initiative has been firing on all cylinders this past year. Highlights include the following: 

• This fall we offered our first three student scholarships in the humanities and arts and we plan to offer twice that many this coming year. 

• We have worked with the administration to reboot the PCC Artist and Writer-in-Residence Program, which supports part-time faculty residencies, so as to give more prominence to the arts and humanities in PCC conversations.

• We have hired our first two HARTS student assistants, who have been instrumental in developing our online presence and Wellspring, our beautiful newsletter, which you can sign up for on our website. 

Finally, we have just welcomed our first two writing residents at the Carolyn Moore Writers House, the only writing residency of its kind at a community college:

• Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. They are the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary.

• Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), both published by Coffee House Press. In 2018 Reed's Indecency won the National Book Award for Poetry. He studies traditional martial arts and participates in alternative rock music cultures. He was born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina and enjoys smelling like outside.

• A free reading with the authors will be happening via Zoom on October 28th at 6:30pm. We hope you will join us for that. 

We are thrilled about all of these developments, which would not be possible without your support.

If you have questions about the Initiative or would like to find out more about what we’re up to and how you can support this work, or you would like to sign up for our newsletter, please be in touch at harts@pcc.edu. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

In the meantime, thank you again for your generosity and warmest wishes,

Andrew Cohen on behalf of The HARTS Council
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Martha Bailey, Philosophy & Religious Studies/Cascade 

Elizabeth Bilyeu, Art/Cascade Andrew Cohen, English/Sylvania, Chair 

John Farnum, Philosophy/Sylvania 

Kelly Kehoe, Communications/Sylvania

Elizabeth Knight, English/Rock Creek 

Andrea Lowgren, Women’s Studies/Cascade 

Melissa Manolas, English/Rock Creek  

Billy Merck, English/Southeast 

John Mery, Music/Sylvania Porter Raper, English/Cascade 

Justin Rigamonti, English/Cascade 

Elissa Minor Rust, English/Rock Creek 

Megan Savage, English/Sylvania 

Kristine Shmakov, Russian/Sylvania 

Patrick Walters, English/Sylvania 

Christine Weber, Art/Sylvania 

Van Wheeler, English/Sylvania 

Stephanie Whitney, French/Sylvania

Student Assistant Frances Ferguson

HARTS (Humanities and Arts) only needs $2,558 to meet its Big Give Day goal. Please take a moment to share a post on social media or send an email to your network. 

Here's a sample message that you can send to help HARTS out.

I just gave to HARTS (Humanities and Arts) during #PCCBigGiveDay to support PCC students. Please join me and help HARTS reach its goal. Make your gift before 11:59 PM today by visiting:  https://www.givecampus.com/schools/PortlandCommunityCollege/humanities-arts-harts-program. @portlandccf