Lewis & Clark College's new William Stafford Room in the Watzek Library is now completed and in use. Its bookshelves (seen on left in a partial watercolor view by staffer Anneliese Dehner) house around two thousand items, among them the published collections of five Lewis & Clark professors: National Book Award Winner William Stafford, National Book Award Finalist Vern Rutsala, Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada, Western States Book Award Winner Kim Stafford, and Witter Bynner Prizewinner Mary Szybist. They also house the books belonging to the college's Pacifist Collection (including the complete output of Waldport CPS camp's Untide Press and the camp's Illiterati magazine) and collections of four other Oregon small presses specializing in poetry: Jim Anderson's Breitenbush Books, Vi Gale's Prescott Street Press, Carlos Reyes's Trask House Books, and Erik Muller's Traprock Books. The collection focuses on Oregon writers, with substantial collections of the work of Hazel Hall, Katherine Dunn, Paulann Petersen and others.

The room's walls are graced with broadsides selected from around one hundred broadsides of poems by William Stafford and many of his contemporaries, including a large number of broadsides designed by Karla Elling at Arizona's Mummy Mountain Press. The room is in use as the center for continuing archival work on the William Stafford, Vern Rutsala, and Vi Gale Collections, as well as for small-group student/faculty poetry workshops. It may be viewed by appointment through this web site.