Sibyl Barsky Grucci Gives Penn State’s English Department $300,000 To Fund Preservation Of Poetry
October 12, 2000
University Park, Pa.–Sibyl Barsky Grucci of State College has donated $300,000 to Penn State’s Department of English to endow the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Center. The endowment will support the establishment and maintenance of the center, a place Grucci envisions as a repository for creative writing.

Sibyl Barsky Grucci is the widow of Joseph Grucci, the first professor to teach a poetry writing workshop at Penn State. The Grucci center will be in Burrowes Building on the University Park campus, the home of the English department.

The endowment’s funds will be used not only to maintain the physical space for the center, but to enhance a collection of materials related to the writing of fiction and poetry, to fund readings and visiting writers, and to support graduate student fellows to manage the center.

The Gruccis arrived in State College in 1950, when Joe Grucci was recruited from the University of Pittsburgh’s English department. He had already published two volumes of verse, and had established his reputation as a translator, being among the first people to translate Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda into English.

Grucci’s poetry workshop was a first at Penn State, and was a class in which the students’ responses to one another’s poems were as important as Grucci’s own criticism of the work. From its early years, the class attracted such diverse students as the head of the University’s meteorology department, writers and editors in the communications offices of Penn State, adult students from the surrounding community and local veterans.

The class led Grucci to found the literary journal PIVOT. For many years, the journal carried only the work of his students. But as it gained praise from such literary luminaries as Wallace Stevens and X.J. Kennedy, the journal grew to become a force in American poetry. It is still published today as a journal of contemporary international poetry by a group of editors in New York City.

Sibyl Grucci said she endowed the Grucci Poetry Center in part to preserve the history of Penn State’s role in American poetry, and she hopes that it will serve as a gathering place for new poets. "I had to do it," she said. "My husband loved poetry and did everything he could to teach others about it."

The center will house many of the Gruccis’ personal possessions. Sibyl is a sculptor, and her work has been exhibited around the country. At Penn State, her bust of Fred Lewis Pattee, considered the founder of the study of American literature, graces the lobby of the library named after him. Her sculpture "Dancer" will have a permanent home in the Grucci Poetry Center.

Many of Joseph Grucci’s books will also reside there, including three collections of poems by Eugene McCarthy, the man more famous for his Senate career than his verse. The McCarthys and the Gruccis were personal friends, and Joe Grucci is mentioned in one of his books. Also in that room will be rare first editions, numerous journals and collections and issues of PIVOT.