This year NCBR presents a special award to The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University in recognition of the Center's 50th anniversary. When San Francisco State University opened at its current site in 1954, Professor Ruth Witt-Diamant convinced the campus president to invite W.H. Auden to deliver the dedication speech. After Auden's lecture, Diamant told him of her vision to create a center for poets on the campus and Auden donated his honorarium to help her begin. Theodore Roethke was the first reader in the Center's prestigious literary reading series---now the longest running in Northern California---which also presented William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Langston Hughes in its early years. In 1974, the National Endowment for the Arts helped the Center start videotaping its programs. Today the American Poetry Archives' video collection is one of the largest and most significant in the country. The Center continues its prestigious reading series and community programs to this day, including---in celebration of its 50th Anniversary---the exhibition, "Poetry and Its Arts: Bay Area Interactions, 1954-2004," on view through April 16 in the galleries of the California Historical Society. For more information on The Poetry Center and its programs: 415-338-2227, www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/