Richard Shelton taught creative writing at the University of Arizona for decades, and is also well-known for founding the Arizona Prison Writing Project.
Kathryn Palmer When morning sunlight pours through the east-facing windows at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, it filters through poet Richard Shelton’s words, which are written in binary code cut-outs on a parallel stone wall.
People are also reading… 'Premier Southwestern poet'“He was the premier Southwestern poet and one of the premier poets of his generation in the country,” said writer Bob Houston, Shelton’s longtime friend and colleague in the UA English Department. “He was a wonderful storyteller. He was a very strong environmentalist, a lover of the desert and everything it represents.”
Although Shelton and his family left Bisbee after a short time so he could enroll in an English PhD program at the UA in Tucson, he would later reflect on the old Southern Arizona mining town in his 1992 book, Going Back to Bisbee. He never did earn his doctorate, though. As Houston remembers it, Shelton’s dissertation committee didn’t like his analysis of Elizabethan literature; instead of changing it, Shelton stopped his schooling with a master’s and was hired to teach writing in the English Department.In the 1970s, Shelton helped push for the establishment of the UA’s master of fine arts program in creative writing, which is now one of the top-ranked programs in the country.
“Lois and Richard worked hard to put the poetry center on the map, which put Tucson on the map as a place that cares about writers and poets,” Meier said. “They created a sense of identity for Tucson as a place that mattered in the national literary conversation.”“He was a study in contrast. On the one hand, he was a super writing teacher who could bring out the best in people.
Up until his death, Shelton had been working on a book of vignettes about his famous guests visiting him in Tucson. Getting Shelton’s last piece of writing posthumously published is now a goal of his close friend and protégé, Ken Lamberton. “Writing opened up a whole new world for me. The nature of incarceration is that your life is shrunken down to the size of a 4-foot by 10-foot-cell. Writing really opened up my eyes to seeing a world that was there and connected me to a larger community of writers,” he said. “ expanded my mind when I was in a dark place.”
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