University of Arizona Poetry Center, Poetry library in Tucson, United States

The University of Arizona Poetry Center occupies a 17,000-square-foot building named for Tucson arts patron Dr. Helen S. Schaefer, designed by Line and Space, LLC, and opened in fall 2007. Its open shelves hold roughly 40,000 poetry books plus 300 broadsides, 3,000 photographs and 1,500 recordings, many from the Reading Series begun in 1962.

The center was founded in 1960 when Ruth Stephan donated her personal collection of contemporary poetry books to establish the library's foundation. What began as a single person's gift grew into one of the nation's largest publicly accessible poetry archives.

The Reading Series, started in 1962, has produced some 1,500 recordings held in the collection, so readings by visiting poets are documented rather than lost. Ruth Stephan wanted visitors to encounter poetry "without intermediaries"; the center also runs writers-in-the-schools and writers-in-the-prisons programs.

The collection is non-circulating, so books are read on site rather than borrowed. The 2007 building by Line and Space, LLC, named for Tucson arts patron Dr. Helen S. Schaefer, provides meeting and gathering spaces alongside the shelves. The center sits within the College of Humanities and is open and fully accessible to the public.

The center maintains the largest publicly accessible poetry collection in the nation where readers can freely browse open shelves rather than request materials through a catalog. This approach creates unexpected discoveries and lets visitors stumble upon texts they would otherwise never encounter.