The UA Poetry Center needs a new building.

The center currently offers more than 39,000 items that include books, periodicals, artist-designed limited edition books, photographs and audio and video recordings. This extensive collection is partly housed in one of three small, beige, stucco dwellings on North Cherry Avenue owned by UA.

"We have outgrown our current housing," said Alison Deming, director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. "Up to one-third of the collection is now in offsite storage."

Three houses comprise the center's offices, classrooms, archival space and library.

"Right now, we are housed in three buildings that are older homes," said Frances Sjoberg, events coordinator for the center. "We have students working at desks in an old kitchen which is funky and fun but can be difficult - my desk is in the pantry. Our offices are spread out between two houses, the Poetry Center and the Poetry Center Annex."

Creative writing and poetry classes are held in the Poetry Center Annex.

"There is a small seminar room in the annex for classes of no more than 12 people," Sjoberg said.

"I currently have two classes which meet in the Poetry Center Annex, which, although nice, is a bit cramped," said second-year poetry graduate student Alison Hoffmann in an e-mail interview. "It would be wonderful to have more seminar spaces - not only for class meetings, but for the question and answer sessions the Poetry Center hosts."

The Poetry Center has a wider range of community-based programs than any other poetry center of its type in the nation.

"(It is) the only Poetry Center in the nation that offers such a range of programs," Deming said in an e-mail, "including an extensive special collection library of poetry, outreach programs to the community, Reading Series, residencies for visiting poets, programs in schools and prisons, special exhibitions, cultural and artistic events."

Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as teachers from a variety of disciplines, use the center to enhance their academic experience at the UA.

"It is used by grad and undergrad students as a source of academic support for those studying creative writing, cultural studies, literature and other fields," Deming stated. "Faculty use it for course planning and curriculum development, as well as assigning student projects at the center."

In addition to UA faculty and students, the general public makes use of the center's facilities and collection and attends programs it sponsors.

Through the UA's Campaign Arizona fundraising campaign and other sources such as grants and private donations, the center has raised almost half of the necessary $4.3 million to build a new "landmark facility."

"We have raised over $2.1 million toward our goal," Deming said. "This campaign is part of Campaign Arizona, the university's major fund-raising project at this time. The center has significant support from the university, as well as having its own library acquisitions endowment, grant money and private donor support."

A new building for the center will offer, in addition to new classroom and office space, room for the two university-based literary magazines.

"There will be a better equipped classrooms for creative writing workshops and seminars, and there will also be offices for Persona - the undergraduate literary magazine - and Sonora Review, a national literary magazine edited by graduate students," Sjoberg said.

Also, the center plans to better display and control the humidity and temperature of its rare books and general collection in a future building.

"The Poetry Center building is climate-controlled but not humidity or temperature controlled. Because it is an archive, we would like to have a building that will house all of our books in an archivally safe fashion," Sjoberg said. "When we are in the new building, we will pull all of our books out of storage and provide them all together for the public, including our rare books in a rare book room. It will be a distinguished building to house our distinguished collections · the building itself will become a destination for researchers and poets alike."