Ruth Witt-Diamant

Ruth Witt-Diamant, a professor at San Francisco State University from 1931, founded and was the first director of the SFSU Poetry Center in 1954. In her youth, she traveled and taught English poetry in Japan, becoming good friends with the Tokugawa family. She hosted many famous poets in her guest room when she owned the house at 1520 Willard Street. Among the writers who slept here were Anaïs Nin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Stephen Spender and Theodore Roethke. Dylan Thomas also was a frequent guest; and had even written a poem about the seemingly magical and endless supply of beer from her refrigerator; in fact Thomas died in San Francisco after the police arrested him in North Beach, where he was so drunk they thought he was on heroin; and they gave him anti-heroin medication which unfortunately killed him: Witt-Diamant had to come to the morgue to claim him: it was one of the saddest days of her life.

Witt-Diamant's relationship went back to the days when she visited Thomas and his family in Wales: it was during the war so all food was rationed; but visitors from America rated meat rations: when Witt-Diamant visited Thomas she brought him a huge turkey and everything she could buy in one day: and brought him and his family a months meat rations: this happened for Christmas. Thomas never forgot this; and came to State College in SF to speak at the Poetry Center often; this is before SF State College became SF State University. Auden was the poet laureate of England when he came to christen the Poetry Center when it opened in 1954 and was its first speaker.

The Ruth Witt-Diamant Poetry Prize is awarded in her name by San Francisco State University Poetry Center. [cite web | author=Lois Silverstein, Ph.D.| year=2006 | title=UNDER THE CANOPY: WRITING IN THE CONSULTING ROOM | format=html | work=Seminars and Education Programs | url=http://www.tpi-berkeley.org/04educ/04f06_09.htm | accessdate=2006-10-04]

Notes and references

External links

* [http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/ San Francisco State University Poetry Center]
* [http://www.flickr.com/photos/silliman/50532726/ Photograph of Witt-Diamant, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, 1957 on the SFSU campus]