>> Welcome, everybody.
I'd like to make a couple of announcements before tonight's reading.
First of all, we will have copies of -- do we have somebody selling Sonora Review tonight?
Yes. Copies of our own Sonora Review will be for sale after the reading
and the ASUA bookstore will be selling copies of Gloria Anzaldua's two most recent books
after the reading so you may want to take advantage of that.
Many of them have been sold, so if you still want one, I suggest you hustle right
out of the auditorium after the reading.
[ Inaudible Speaker ]
Pardon? Well, watch my language.
Unruly, unruly crowd.
[ Laughter ]
We are delighted to finally welcome Gloria Anzaldua to our campus.
We've wanted to get her here for a while.
And a number of departments and individuals at the university helped to bring her here.
And we particularly want to thank Women's Studies who brought Gloria
as the first Rockefeller humanist in Women' s Studies.
And the Spanish Department also helped as --
we did the poetry center and the Dean of the faculty of Humanities.
So, thank you to everybody and if I've left someone out, forgive me.
English Department, yes.
English Department, thank you.
[ Laughter ]
Gloria Anzaldua is co-editor of the award-winning This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color, which was published in 1983
by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
In 1987, she published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
A genre-breaking book of poetry, memoir,
and historical analysis written in both Spanish and English.
It was chosen as one of the 38 best books of 1987 by Library Journal.
It's used in a number of courses here and in many other universities across the country.
Her latest work is Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras,
an anthology of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color.
But these facts about her life as a writer are a modest form of introduction as compared
with the responsibility I have to convey to you a sense of the generosity Gloria Anzaldua brings
to other writers, particularly writers of color, gay and lesbian writers,
any of us who's experience leads us to feel that we are on the outside
of what matters in the literary culture.
Perhaps the best introduction for any poet is what the art itself can convey, poet to poet.
So, to complete my introduction, I join Gloria Anzaldua
in welcoming our own Tucson poet, Rita Magdaleno.
She has recently had work published in Puerto del Sol, the Taos Review, the Guadalupe Review
and we'll have poems coming out in the second edition
of Chuck Tatum's anthology, New Chicano Writing.
I think tomorrow or late tonight she's heading off to San Antonio to give a reading
and workshop at the San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and Literary Festival,
so we're very happy that she can be here tonight, Rita Magdaleno.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.