University of Arizona Poetry Center

The University of Arizona Poetry Center is among the nation’s most extensive collections of contemporary poetry. It is the largest such collection which is "open shelf."

The University of Arizona Poetry Center was founded in 1960 by Ruth Stephan as a place "to maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry." The Poetry Center's mission is to promote poetic literacy and sustain, enrich and advance a diverse literary culture. The Poetry Center sponsors numerous programs, including readings, lectures, classes and workshops, writing residencies, writers-in-the-schools, writers-in-the-prisons, contests, exhibitions and online resources, including standards-based poetry curricula.

An area of special emphasis within the College of Humanities, the Poetry Center is open and fully accessible to the public. In fall 2007, the Poetry Center moved into a 17,000-square-foot (1,600 m²) building named for Tucson arts patron Dr. Helen S. Schaefer. The Poetry Center's new building, designed by Line and Space, LLC, makes the Center's entire collection of contemporary poetry fully accessible for the first time in decades. The facility also provides meeting and gathering spaces for the Center's extensive literary programs and activities.

Ruth Walgreen Stephan (1910–1974) was a writer and philanthropist who began visiting Tucson in the 1950s. She grew up in Chicago, the daughter of Charles Rudolph Walgreen (the founder of the national drug store chain Walgreens) and attended Northwestern University. Her first notable publication, a poem titled "Identity," appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1937. Her work soon began appearing in other leading magazines, such as Poetry and Forum. In the 1940s and 1950s she wrote both poetry and novels (The Flight and My Crown, My Love) and with her husband, the artist John Stephan, published an influential international quarterly of art and literature called The Tiger's Eye. After spending a year in Peru, she compiled and translated the first English-language collection of Quechua songs and tales. She also produced a series of records, The Spoken Anthology of American Literature, for international audiences. She lived in Japan for a while and made a documentary film on Zen Buddhism.

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