2006, Richard and Lois Shelton
Richard Shelton’s first book, The Tattooed Desert, won the International Poetry Forum’s UNITED STATES AWARD in 1970, and The Bus to Veracruz was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Shelton has been the recipient of two NEA Writer’s Fellowships (one in poetry and one in nonfiction) and three Borestone Mountain Awards, including First Award in Borestone Mountain’s Best Poems of 1971. His first book of nonfiction, Going Back to Bisbee, received the Western States Arts Award for creative nonfiction in 1992.
Richard Shelton’s poems and prose pieces have appeared in more than 200 magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Kayak, The American Poetry Review, and The Antioch Review, and have been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Polish and Japanese. National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation have featured his work, and he has read at colleges and universities throughout the country. Established American composers have set many of his poems to music.
In 1974, Shelton established, under the auspices of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a Creative Writer’s Workshop at the Arizona State Prison. Many books of poetry and prose by the men in that workshop have been published, including the anthology Do Not Go Gentle. Since 1991, the workshop has been supported by grants from the Lannan Foundation. It currently meets at the Santa Rita Unit of the Arizona State Prison, Tucson. Past and present members of the workshop continue to publish poetry and prose in dozens of journals and have also published books with, most recently, Mercury House and the University of Arkansas Press.
Shelton has lived in Southern Arizona since 1956. He is a Regents Professor in the English Department at the University of Arizona, where he was Director of the Creative Writing Program from 1979 to 1981. He has served as Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and has been a member of the Board of Directors for a total of 17 years. He has been Acting Director of the Composition Program, Faculty Fellow and a Flinn Scholar Mentor. From 1980 to 1982, he was one of the three judges of the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets. He has served two terms as president of the board of directors for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) and National Honorary Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. He serves as consultant to six university presses. In 1991, he and his wife, Lois Shelton, were joint recipients of the Governor’s Award for support of the arts in Arizona. In 2000, he was the recipient of a $100,000 Completion Grant from the Lannan Foundation.
Co-recipient of this year’s Arizona Literary Treasure Award is Lois Shelton. Lois was Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center from 1970 until 1991. She and her husband, Richard have been closely allied with the Poetry Center since it was donated as a generous gift from Ruth Stephan to the University of Arizona in 1960. A mezzo soprano, Mrs. Shelton was also very active in Tucson’s Opera Company, performing featured roles in 11 productions, including its first production, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, and appearing in several Gilbert & Sullivan productions, the Traildust Theater’s productions of The Sound of Music, The King and I, and the old Arizona Civic Theater’s Carnival and The Threepenny Opera. She has been a soloist with the Tucson symphony, and has sung in community choruses and at several Tucson churches, most frequently at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church.
She is the production editor of Walking Rain Review, a magazine of poetry and prose by writers in Professor Shelton’s writing programs at the Arizona State Prison. She and her husband are currently working on Volume 12. The magazine appears once each year. She also prepares clean copy from the handwritten work of the prisoners for the weekly classes. She has prepared book length manuscripts for men in the prison that have won national prizes.
Mrs. Shelton is enjoying her retirement, especially volunteering with Native Seeds Search. She served for three years on the board of The Asylum Program of Southern Arizona (a group giving legal assistance to those applying for political asylum) and is now affiliated with Lutheran Social Services.
