borders

In this performance, Jimmy Santiago Baca reads from Black Mesa Poems, a collection published the year after this reading took place. He also performs poems from Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, a book that was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award and earned Jimmy Santiago Baca an NEA grant for the year of this reading.

Jane Miller reads from her collection Midnights (2008).

Demetria Martinez reads work from The Devil's Workshop (2002), Breathing Between the Lines (1997), and Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana (2005). She also reads a short story from the manuscript of The Block Captain's Daughter, which would go on to be published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2012. This reading was originally given alongside Rebecca Seiferle. 

Ofelia Zepeda reads from her collection Where Clouds Are Formed (2008). This reading was originally given with Luci Tapahonso. 

Alberto Ríos reads from his work in English and Spanish as part of a multilingual poetry reading also featuring Ofelia Zepeda (reading in English and O'odham) and Sherwin Bitsui (reading in English and Navajo). The reading includes selections from Water, an artist book created by Karla Elling to commemorate the Poetry Center's 50th anniversary. Water features a chainlink of poetry composed and translated by Bitsui, Ríos, Zepeda, and Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo.

In the first reading of the Poetry Center's 50th anniversary year, former Poetry Center Director and University of Arizona Regents' Professor Emeritus Richard Shelton reads from his books The Last Person to Hear Your Voice (2007) and Crossing the Yard (2007).

Pat Mora reads from her first two books of poems, Chants (1984) and Borders (1986), as well as poems that would later be published, sometimes in different versions, in Communion (1991) and Agua Santa (1997). Mora, who hails from El Paso, includes several poems about the desert in honor of what she describes as "probably the first time I have done a reading in another desert area."

Ofelia Zepeda reads primarily from her collections Ocean Power (1995) and Where Clouds are Formed (2008). She also reads from an unpublished essay and from her chapbook Jewed 'I-Hoi/Earth Movements (1997).

Gloria E. Anzaldúa reads widely from her extensive body of work; this reading includes uncollected and unpublished poems.

Pat Mora reads from Agua Santa / Holy Water (1995), Borders (1986), and Chants (1984). She also reads an excerpt from a manuscript that would later be published as House of Houses (1997).

Cathy Park Hong reads from Engine Empire (2012) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007); she also reads an unpublished poem.

Jimmy Santiago Baca reads poems and prose from his body of work, including A Glass of Water (2009), A Place to Stand (2002), Healing Earthquakes (2001), Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (1987), and C-Train (Dream Boy's Story) and Thirteen Mexicans: Poems (2002).

Diana García reads from her collection When Living Was a Labor Camp (2000).

Luis Alberto Urrea reads from Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993), The Fever of Being (1994), Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999), and also from The Best American Poetry (1996).

Nathalie Handal reads poems from The Lives of Rain (2005) and Spell (2006) as well as new poems.

Arizona's inaugural Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos reads public and personal poems from his collected and uncollected works; he also speaks about goals for his laureateship.

Ofelia Zepeda reads from her poems in O'odham and in English. She also reads from an unfinished translation of a story originally told by an O'odham medicine man.

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.

Roberto Tejada reads poems from Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), which he describes as inhabiting the "actual and surreal" US-Mexico Borderlands. He also reads from a manuscript in progress begun during the Coronavirus pandemic titled Carbonate of Copper, informed by a widening and blurring sense of the self, the human, and the non-human.