With its heritage as a home for poets, Camden is poised to become a center for the practice and study of writing in Southern New Jersey. The Walt Whitman Center for the Arts at 2nd and Cooper Streets, which offers a regular program of writing-related events, will collaborate with the Writers House so that both can make the most economical use of writers visiting the area. To this end, Ms. Alicia Askenase, the director of literary programs at the Whitman Center, will be invited to sit on the board of the Writers House. Mr. Andy Kahan, the director of the Authors Lectures series at the Free Library of Philadelphia, has already agreed to serve on the board of the Writers House and to program events in collaboration with it, and a similar arrangement would be sought with the Kelly Writers House at Penn. The annual Spring Writers Conference at Rutgers-Camden, now entering its eighteenth year, will use the offices of the Writers House and hold at least some of its workshops and readings there. The American Studies program at Rutgers, which is planning a conference on AWhitman and Childhood@ in collaboration with the Whitman Center and the Center for Childhood Studies, will hold an opening or closing reception at the Writers House if it is completed by 2005, the sesquicentennial of the publication of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. These are only a few of the writing-related events that would be enhanced by a Writers House, for which no comparable facility now exists on the campus.