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Kenneth Koch opens this reading with two poems about place: Senegal and Kenya specifically. The rest of the performance is devoted to poems collected in One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays.

Judith Barrington reads from History and Geography (1989) along with poems that would go on to be collected in Horses and the Human Soul (2004) and several that remain uncollected. The poems she selects for this reading center on place, landscape, memory, and Lesbian identity; horses recur throughout.

Jorie Graham reads from her poetry collection Fast (2017).

Joshua Beckman presents a lecture on poems as "an exposure of unknowing" and reading aloud as a way of immersing the body and mind in a poem. This lecture was originally given with Terrance Hayes and Dorothea Lasky as part of the 2018 Bagley Wright Lecture Series conference "You Are Who I Am Talking To: Poetry, Attention, & Audience."

Rubén Martínez discusses being at an impasse in writing, what he describes as surgimiento in Spanish, or emergence. His talk touches on his personal experience and writing, as well as work by other writers and artists.

Maggie Smith presents a lecture on the ways that poems can enact wonder, questioning, sincerity, and rediscovery. She reads and discusses poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Oliver De La Paz, Ross Gay, and Matthew Olzmann to illustrate her argument.

Cara Blue Adams, an alumna of the UA MFA in Creative Writing Program, reads a short story titled "Shoulder Season" from her collection You Never Get It Back (2021). This story takes place in Tucson and follows a protagonist who is in an optical sciences graduate program at UA, but decides to leave school and become a writer. This reading was originally given alongside Alberto Ríos and Aisha Sabatini Sloan to celebrate the MFA program's 50th anniversary.