Hello, everyone.
Thanks for patience and welcome to the very first reading
of 2014, this brilliant and lovely new year
that we find ourselves in; a year which
promises many fascinating and new things that
will dramatically improve all of our lives.
I'm sure you've looked at these things online that exist,
including a combined double headline summer tour of Journey
and Steve Miller coming to a city near you.
The Tucson Streetcar comes this year.
Woo!
We can be excited.
He says-- there's skepticism.
[LAUGHTER]
I heard a little.
A tiny bit, just a little bit.
The FIFA World Cup will make us all
wish that we lived in Brazil.
There's a terrific new website that's
coming from the Poetry Center.
Be excited.
Yay!
It'll be even easier to track down the things
that we're doing and learn about all the things
that are happening here.
It's going to be a big year.
Don't depend on serendipity to learn
about what we're up to, however, and this
is a thing I want to point out.
We do have copies of our spring calendar,
the things that we're doing, and the print
edition that's over there.
We also have an iPad.
And so the iPad will very easily and seamlessly
take your information, and then you'll just get emails.
And they'll remind you about all that we're up to.
So if you have not signed up for our mailing list
and are not worried about getting an email a week,
an innocuous email a week from the Poetry Center,
I encourage you to do that.
There are other goodies that come in those emails
and so it's worth doing.
Both of those things that are over here on the side table.
I am Tyler Meier and I work as the Executive
Director of the Poetry Center here
at the University of Arizona.
And it's my pleasure to welcome you
this evening to a reading featuring the inimitable Tan
Lin.
Some quick thank you's to begin with, very quickly.
We continue to be grateful to the University of Arizona
Foundation and the Office of the Senior Vice
President for Research for awarding the Community
Connections Grant to the Reading Series
that partially underwrites this reading this evening.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to the University of Arizona
Foundation for that grant.
[APPLAUSE]
Woo-hoo!
But second, thank you to everyone
who participated in our annual Giving Campaign
at the end of the year for 2013.
Funds that we were able to raise,
those funds are the dollars that we depend on
to fund in our program in the upcoming year,
and we significantly depend on that to support.
So whether you participated at the friends level
or as a member of the Whitman Circle,
we cannot really thank you enough at all for that help.
We depend on it.
It's critical support.
So thank you again to everybody who participated
in those campaigns.
[APPLAUSE]
If you didn't, but you're excited about it,
next to the IPad.
[LAUGHTER]
You'll find things.
There's envelopes.
We're going to forego a Q&A tonight,
and Tan will have Q&A moments in-between in his talk,
and he'll direct you to that.
So no formal Q&A at the end as per usual,
but instead, questions and answers throughout.
This is an exciting reading.
There is a lot of technology happening in this room in ways
that I'd never seen before right before dinner, including
a ladder.
So things happened and there will be results.
Be excited.
We have tons of books for sale this evening
Poetry Center docents Mark and Christine are here,
and they can satisfy any of your book-buying urges,
and Tan will satisfy any of your book signing
urges when he is done speaking.
It's my pleasure now to introduce to you
and welcome Will Cordeiro, who will introduce Tan,
and we'll get this event off to a great start.
Will has just completed his PhD in literature
at the Cornell University.
He's also a poet whose work has recently
appeared in Burnt District, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard
Review, Drunken Boat, Fourteen Hills, Sentence, South Dakota
Review and elsewhere.
He's teaching a class for the Poetry Center
this spring on the New York School of Poets.
He's a dedicated Poetry Center volunteer.
We're so grateful for all the things he's done,
and continues to do for the Poetry Center.
Please welcome Will Cordeiro.
[APPLAUSE]