communication

As part of the Tucson Festival of Books, Jimmy Santiago Baca performs excerpts from his collection of poems Healing Earthquakes.

Peter Wild reads uncollected poems on a diverse range of subjects, from famous Western frontiersmen to radio therapy to optometrists. Along the way he shares with the audience experiences and preoccupations that have shaped his work.

Stephen Dunn and Dave Smith read from their poems.

In this artists' talk, photographer Seamus Murphy and journalist/poet Eliza Griswold discuss their experiences in Afghanistan and the poems and photographs featured in the exhibition Shame Every Rose: Images from Afghanistan. This exhibition, which traveled to the Poetry Center courtesy of the Poetry Foundation of Chicago, featured photographs presented in pairs to echo the couplet form of the landay, an oral folk poetry created by and for the Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The landays featured in this exhibit also appear in the June 2013 issue of Poetry magazine, as well as in the anthology I Am The Beggar of The World (2014).

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn opens with "Under the Black Oaks," the poem he had most recently written at the time of this reading. Dunn reads poems from throughout his career, often on the theme of family, including a poem about losing his mother, an atheist's parenting dilemmas as his daughter moves toward Christianity, and an ode to the sister he never had.