1925—2009
Poet Alan Stephens was born in Greeley, Colorado, in 1925. He served in the US Army Air Corps and attended Colorado State Teacher’s College (now the University of Northern Colorado), the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Denver, and the University of Missouri, where he earned a PhD. Stephens also studied at Stanford with poet Ivor Winters as a Stegner Fellow. A founder of the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, Stephens was known as a teacher and poet of the American West. According to John Wilson, a colleague at Santa Barbara, Stephens lent “distinction to our place and the people in it. He has written of our creeks, streets, houses, beaches, mountains, schools, parks, trees, flowers, birds and beasts, and people. Not just Santa Barbara but the entire Western landscape has meant a great deal to him as a man and as a writer.”
 
Stephens published numerous collections of poetry in his lifetime, including The Sum (1958), In Plain Air: Poems 1958-1980 (1982), Tree Meditation and Others (1970), The White Boat and Some Other Poems (1995), and Away from the Road (1998). In 2012, Dorwitcher Press released three posthumous books: Selected Poems, Collected Poems (1958–1988), and Running at Hendry’s. Stephens died in 2009.