DID YOU KNOW? The Second Poet Laureate from the state of Arkansas was Italian-American Rosa Zagnoni-Marinoni. She left her Native New York and moved with her husband Antonio Marinoni to Fayetteville, Arkansas where he became the first head of the University of Arkansas’s romance languages department.

Rosa, was also renowned for starting and maintaining some of the first women’s writings groups at the university of Arkansas and is noted as an inspiration by many female writers from Arkansas. Rosa was a poet laureate from 1953 until the time of her passing in 1970. Thanks to Encyclopedia of Arkansas for this photo of her!