[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Diana.
Thank you, all, for coming out, on a Tuesday
night, for a special installment of our MFA program
in Creative Writing Prose Series.
It's nice to see familiar faces, new faces, students
from "Introduction to Fairy Tales."
Yay.
[LAUGHTER]
Thanks for coming.
I'm just going to, quickly, thank our sponsors.
The Department of-- well, of course-- the Poetry Center.
So thank you for allowing us "prosers"
a couple of nights a year.
[LAUGHTER]
The Department of English, the MFA program
in Creative Writing, the Haury Fund.
Thanks to Professor Alison Deming,
for a generous sponsorship.
Poets and writers, the Literary Journal, Fairy Tale Review,
the Department of Gender and Women's
Studies, the Institute for LGBTQ Studies, and DIAGRAM magazine.
Wow.
I think I've covered it all.
Those are our sponsors.
If you gather, from the list of sponsors, it's because, yes.
We have genuine, beautiful interest
in our amazing, esteemed writers and the students
that we have-- who come from all over the world--
to work in Tucson, many of whom are here tonight
and who are your teachers.
It's also because-- funding reasons.
Yes, we do have to ask for co-sponsorship.
So if you enjoy evenings like tonight, and you enjoy authors,
like Aimee Bender--
and you love the Poetry Center and the Voca
archives and listen to those resources
from wherever you are--
please consider contributing to the prose series.
There's no amount too small to contribute.
As I say, always, our visiting authors,
sometimes, do want a cup of coffee.
So--
[LAUGHTER]
--there's no contribution too small.
But thank you so much for coming.
It's my honor tonight to introduce Kim Bussing to you,
an MFA candidate in fiction, who will
have the pleasure of introducing our visitor, Aimee Bender.
Thank you for coming.
[APPLAUSE]