The Elias Wilentz Collection contains manuscripts by poets such as Ted Berrigan, Joel Oppenheimer, and Jonathan Williams; correspondence; photographs; and miscellaneous items.

Emery George, born in Hungary in 1933 and naturalized as an American citizen in 1954, is a prolific poet, translator, and scholar of Germanic literature. His collection contains manuscripts of original and translated poetry, published works, and business correspondence.

This collection contains material related to the magazine Fire Exit (1967-1975), edited and published by William Corbett for four numbered issues and related broadsides, including correspondence and submissions from 1955-1992; production material for issues 1-4; and William Corbett's personal manuscripts, notebooks, and ephemera.

The First Intensity Collection contains the editorial correspondence for Lee Chapman's literary magazine from 1992 to 2007. Correspondence contains poetry submissions, page proofs, reviews, and articles from poets featured in First Intensity.

The Frontier Press Collection includes publications, manuscripts, galleys, proofs, designs, artwork, and correspondence relating to Harvey Brown's and Frontier Press. Notable items include letters and manuscripts from Ed Dorn, Charles Olson, John Wieners, and Stan Brakhage, plus an unpublished assemblage of photographs and text once proposed as a Frontier Press publication; and various photographs and art.

The Gabrielle Bouliane collection includes materials related to the life and career of Gabrielle Bouliane as well as slam poetry events. Gabrielle Bouliane was a performance poet who performed at several National Poetry Slams and founded the Nickel City Slam. The collection materials includes ephemera and articles related to slam poetry events as well as notes and other written materials by Gabrielle Bouliane.

Gail Sher is a San Francisco area-based writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. She earned her B.A. in English from Northwestern University, received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin but chose instead to study middle English and (later) harpsichord at the University of California, Berkeley. She won a Teacher of the Year award from the combined education faculties of Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco State for her high school teaching of English. She completed her M.A. in Clinical Psychology at John F. Kennedy University and has been a practicing psychotherapist since 1991. In 1970 she was ordained as a lay disciple of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and her work as both a writer and a therapist is influenced by her training in Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Yoga. Since 1982, she has published over thirty books of poetry and three books on writing as a craft and a spiritual practice. The Gail Sher Collection includes both handwritten and typed manuscripts, correspondence between Sher and other poets and poet-editors, art, photographs, and documentation of her published work, including many journals in which her poetry has appeared.

Greg Haymes (1951-2019) was a writer, musician and visual artist. Born in Buffalo and raised in Tonawanda, NY, he moved to Albany to attend the State University of New York at Albany, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Theatre, with an English minor, emphasizing poetry, in 1972. He remained in the Albany area and worked as a journalist, music critic, and artist until his death. Between 1974 and 1978, Haymes mailed nearly 500 copies of a letter along with return postcards, asking recipients to "describe the sky." The collection comprises 225 original postcards mailed to Haymes as part of the Skymail project, along with 2 notebooks documenting the project.

Collection contains yearbooks for the following years: 1884, 1887-1925, 1967-1968, 1971-1972.

Opened in 2006, the Hallwalls Collection contains the Hallwalls Video Collection Preservation Project, featuring recorded performances as well as thousands of items of publications, photographs, artist files, grant applications, business records, calendars, publicity materials, and other ephemera and realia documenting the history of the Contemporary Arts Center.