grandmother

Sandra Cisneros reads short stories from The House on Mango Street (1984) and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and poetry from My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987).

Lawson Fusao Inada performs poems that speak to the Asian American experience, particularly around Japanese American internment during World War II and life in mid-century Fresno, California. He reads a selection of poems from Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971), along with with other poems from the 1970s, including "I Told You So."

Greg Sarris reads a story titled "Waiting for the Green Frog," in the voice of an elderly medicine woman, from his collection Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories (1994).

Luci Tapahonso reads from her collections Seasonal Woman (1982) and A Breeze Swept Through (1987), beginning with a piece that combines spoken poetry with song.

Diane Glancy reads a range of works on the theme of story, including a number of poems that would subsequently appear in The West Pole (1997) and (Ado)ration (1999). She also reads excerpts from Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1996) and closes the reading with a brief extract from Firesticks (1993). 

Rosemary Catacalos reads from her first collection, Again for the First Time (1984), before sharing more recent poems. Several of the more recent poems would appear in anthologies throughout the 1990s or would be collected in her chapbook Begin Here (2013). San Antonio, Texas, figures prominently, and key themes include multicultural identity and life in border communities.

Monica Sok reads poems from her collection A Nail the Evening Hangs On (2020). This reading was originally given alongside Tiana Clark.

Lorna Dee Cervantes reads from her unpublished manuscript titled Fire: Poems Against Pandemic, as well as from her latest published collection, April on Olympia (2021). In these poems, Cervantes touches upon grief, connectedness with the earth, and climate change. She also pays poetic tribute to a range of figures that include her grandmother, a homeroom teacher from junior high, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the writers Julia Alvarez and Allen Ginsberg.

Alberto Ríos, poet laureate of Arizona and alumnus of the UA MFA in Creative Writing program, reads across his published body of work, specifically poems from his books Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), The Dangerous Shirt (2009), and Not Go Away Is My Name (2020). Major themes in this reading include Ríos' grandmother, language, ancestry, and occasions around food. This reading was originally given alongside Cara Blue Adams and Aisha Sabatini Sloan to celebrate the MFA program's 50th anniversary.