Welcome.
I'm glad you're all here tonight.
We do have Martin Espada's books for sale, courtesy of ASUA
bookstore, after the reading.
So please take advantage of that.
I'd like to announce a couple of events that are going
on in the community this week.
I think this is right.
Hugh, correct me.
Tomorrow night, at the Shane House,
there is a reading by the contest winners among students
at the University who are taking the 209 poetry workshop.
That's at 8 o'clock at Shane House tomorrow night.
And Friday night, in the Chax Press
reading series, Here and Now, which
is being held down at the Tucson Museum of Art,
there will be a reading by Mark Weiss and Arthur Sze.
I'm really delighted to be closing our season of ratings
this fall with a visit from Martin Espada.
He comes to us from Boston, where he works
as both a poet and a lawyer.
He's the author of three books of poetry, The Immigrant Ice
Boys Bolero, Trumpets From the Islands of Their Eviction,
Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands.
And his new book, which is coming out from Norton,
characteristically having an interesting title
if he can get away with his publisher, The City of Coughing
and Dead Radiators.
His literary awards include two NEA fellowships,
the Massachusetts Arts Fellowship,
and a PEN/Revson Foundation Fellowship, among others.
As you'll hear in his work, his legal work
has involved working with and on behalf of Latino people
in the Northeast--
in particular, working with farmworkers and, more recently,
low-income tenants.
He writes hard-edged, documentary poems,
which never lose the capacity for song,
even when they tell us the harshest of truths.
Please welcome Martin Espada.
[APPLAUSE]