ancestry

In this performance, Alison Hawthorne Deming reads both poetry and prose, including excerpts from a book published the year of this reading, The Edges of the Civilized World, and poems from a collection that would be published seven years later, Genius Loci.

Poetry Center Summer Resident Lehua M. Taitano gives an interactive reading of poems from her collection Inside Me an Island (2018). She also presents her latest work, a video poem created for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's "A Day in the Queer Life" project. This reading was originally given alongside Bojan Louis.

Victoria Chang reads from her published works Obit (2020), Dear Memory (2021), and The Trees Witness Everything (2022). She also shares new, uncollected poems. Chang's poems touch upon grief from the death of her parents, as well as found material from family archives. She also reads work structured in a Japanese syllabic form called waka.

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.