University of Arizona Poetry Center

The Collection

Ruth Stephan and Myrtle Walgreen Collection

The University of Arizona Poetry Center possesses one of the finest, most extensive and fully accessible collections of contemporary poetry in the nation. The Poetry Center’s library is most comprehensive in contemporary English language poetry (including translations from other languages) from the last half of the twentieth century through the current day and maintains a strong representative collection of poetry from previous decades and centuries. The collection comprises single author monographs, anthologies, literary journals, rare books, limited edition books, artist-made books, chapbooks, broadsides, photographs, prose and critical works by poets and recordings. There is an open shelf reference collection including dictionaries, directories, handbooks, encyclopedias, biographies and bibliographies.

In 1960 Ruth Stephan seeded the collection with several hundred volumes of poetry. By 1970 the collection had grown to over 3,000 volumes. Supported by an acquisitions endowment provided by Stephan and her mother Myrtle Walgreen, the collection now contains over 60,000 items, including 30,000 volumes of poetry and 24,000 issues of journals and periodicals (320 current subscriptions), 300 broadsides, 3,000 photographs and 1,500 recordings. All holdings are cataloged in the Library’s database, which is available and searchable by clicking here.
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