Reading by Stephanie Balzer
Thursday, February 5, 8 p.m.
at the Helen S. Schaefer Building (Poetry Center)
A resident of Tucson for forty years, Mary Ann Campau was a devoted supporter of poetry and poets in our community. She began to take workshops at the Poetry Center and at the Writing Works Center in 1989. Mary Ann hosted writing classes with guest poets in her own home; provided "grants" to writers who could not otherwise afford to attend these and other workshops; she attended, supported, and participated in numerous local reading series; and through her own enthusiasm she cultivated new audiences for poetry. Her poems were published in local journals, and in 2001 she published a full-length collection of her own poetry, Like a Waterwheel Ghost. In the spirit of Mary Ann Campau, this Fellowship is offered to recognize poets who work actively and consistently to support poetry in the Tucson area.
The Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship provides a $1000 stipend, and winners read for the Poetry Center Reading Series.
We are pleased to announce the winner of the Mary Ann Campau Fellowship, recognizing Southern Arizona poets who strengthen and inspire our literary landscape. STEPHANIE BALZER was chosen because of her service to the Tucson literary and arts communities.
Stephanie Balzer is the Executive Director of VOICES: Community Stories Past and Present, Inc. (www.voicesinc.org), a Tucson-based nonprofit that provides youth with a safe space, positive relationships and skills training to document real-life stories and the platform to share them with the world. VOICES' vision is that all youth have the opportunity to become connected, confident and critically thinking adults who decide what their futures look like. Stephanie holds a master's degree in poetry from The University of Arizona and her poems have appeared in CUE, Mid-American Review, and Chelsea, and are forthcoming in Cannibal. Stephanie's chapbook, Revenant, is forthcoming from Kore Press. Prior to working at VOICES, she served as the Communications Officer for the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona and reported for The Business Journal in Phoenix.
Working with the local grassroots poetry community, Stephanie helped put together chapbooks and poetry readings to raise money benefiting Iraqi youth who have been effected by the war, and also survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Along with Morgan Schuldt she serves as a Contributing Editor to CUE, which will be publishing a chapbook of her work in Spring 2009. She has served as a volunteer for the Arizona Commission on the Arts grant selection process and a judge for University High School's Poetry Out Loud! competition. Stephanie likes to read the New York Times on Sunday mornings at Time Market and eats lunch nearly every work day at Cafe 54 in Tucson's downtown.
Morgan Lucas Schuldt writes:
"To know Stephanie--be it the self-effacing leader who's made it her mission to invigorate VOICES, or the more solitary thinker who, without pretensions to camp or creed, quietly composes and publishes intelligent, sassy, whimsical prose poetry--is to warm to a singular talent, the kind of person who you suspect can do anything she sets her mind to, and who, because of her restlessness and curiousity of spirit, usually does. I can't imagine a more deserving recipient for this year's Mary Ann Campau Memorial Fellowship than Stephanie Balzer."
Boyer Rickel writes:
I've always loved Stephanie Balzer's poetry for its freshness of perspective yet utter sophistication in execution. Her work has an O'Hara-esque 'now this, now that' quality that charms and disarms the reader on the way to matters of substance, though the 'nows' are as likely to be odd bits of history or scientific research as personal anecdotes and observations. They make a world—in all its risk and unpredictability, and all its warmth."
Barbara Cully writes:
"Her work garners media coverage for the arts, invites new artists to join artists' coalitions, and helps audiences to access the arts locally and easily.
Her dedication to Tucson manifests many unpaid (volunteer) positions she holds as well.
She holds these titles and contributes these benefits as a working artist whose example of artistic excellence is as impressive as her generous giving of her time.
"Her recently completed book of poems, Revenant, is masterful and transporting in its form and in its orchestration of themes. I admire her adept handing of the prose poem form, the prose "box" as a playground, a diorama. The graphic matches of visual motifs and her signature ideas accrue, making of fragments a beautiful weave...This is work in which our recognizable local Tucson landscape is transformed through the medium of poetry, and we are better for it."
