St. Clair County Community College will use a $10,000 Challenge America Fast-Track grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to bring two award-winning authors to the Port Huron campus in April.

SC4 received the grant to benefit the 54th edition of Patterns, the college's literary and arts publication of student work. Patterns is the longest continually published community college literary and arts magazine in the state. The publication each year features the best of SC4 student work.

SC4 was selected from among 375 eligible applications to receive one of the 162 grants of $10,000 awarded to organizations in 46 states, plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

This is the fourth time SC4 has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The previous grants were awarded to benefit the 50th, 52nd and 53rd editions of Patterns in 2008, 2010 and 2011, respectively.
The grant will be used to help produce the publication and to bring the guest authors to campus. The authors will judge student work, discuss their work and provide advice to students.

The authors will be part of the Patterns recognition ceremony, reception and guest author readings from 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday, April 22, in the college's Fine Arts Theatre and College Center Atrium.

Guest authors are novelist Jaimy Gordon and poet John Rybicki.

Gordon's Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award in 2010 and the Tony Ryan Award for the year's best book about horse racing. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, 2011. Gordon is the author of three previous novels, Shamp of the City-Solo, She Drove Without Stopping and Bogeywoman, which was on the Los Angeles Times' list of Best Fiction of 2000. Gordon has been a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute at Harvard University. She received an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991. She teaches at Western Michigan University and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Rybicki's latest collection, Who Can Say What Sea, will be published in winter 2012. One poem from the collection just received a Pushcart Prize. His earlier works include We Bed Down Into Water, Yellow Haired Girl with Spider and Traveling at High Speeds. His work has been featured in The Best American Poetry anthologies, Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, North American Review and Field. Rybicki lectures regularly at Haverford College, Kalamazoo College, Swathmore College, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Hope College and Sarah Lawrence College. He also teaches poetry writing to inner-city children in Detroit and works with "Wings of Hope" Hospice teaching poetry writing to children who have been through a trauma or loss. His work in Detroit garnered him an appearance in Time Magazine for Kids, which featured him as an outstanding writing teacher.

The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities.

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