My name is Melissa Buckheit and I'm
going to be moderating this evening.
Um, I'd like to welcome you to the second annual Tucson
Festival of Books, but you already
know that because you're here.
And I particularly want to thank the UA Poetry Center, Chax
Press, POG, Casa Libre en la Solana, Sonora Review,
the Tucson Poetry Festival, um, for sponsoring this year's
events and working hard.
And especially Gail Browne and Cybele Knowles
for all their persistence, effort, and making everything
come together in the end.
Yes, I don't know where she is.
She's over there.
[APPLAUSE]
So the reading will be about one hour and we'll have a question
and answer period afterwards for about 10 or 15 minutes,
so you can hold your questions until then.
We have a mic, we'll pass it around and, um,
a slight adjustment to yesterday's events
in the afternoon, if you want to have your book signed
by Anne or Laynie when you want to purchase a book,
we have them for sale here.
Up there, a variety of their books as well as the authors
who read earlier in the day.
We're going to do the signing here in the space.
We're not going to be going to tent C,
so you can just hang out here, talk to the authors,
get your book signed, OK?
Um, the first reader this evening is Laynie Browne.
It's my pleasure to introduce her and tell you
a little bit about her work.
Laynie Browne was born in 1966 and grew up in Los Angeles.
She received a BA in English literature
from the University of California Berkeley in 1988
and an MFA from Brown University in 1990.
With others, she curated the fellow--
the poetry series, "The Ear Inn",
in New York City from 1992 to 1995.
She received a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in 1992
and was awarded the Gertrude Stein award in innovative
poetry three times in '93-'94, '94-'95, and '95 and '96.
Her work was anthologized-- anthologized, excuse me,
in the book, The Poet's Choice, edited by Robert Hass.
She is the author of multiple collections of poetry and one
novel, including Hereditary Zones, One Constellation,
Rebecca Letters, Lore, Acts of Levitation, The Agency of Wind,
Pollen Memory, Mermaid's Purse, Clepsydra, A Scented Fox,
which was the recipient of the 2005 National Poetry Series
award, and Daily Sonnets, as well
as Drawing A Swan Before Memory, some of her more recent books.
Two additional collections are forthcoming,
The Desires of Letters and Roseate and Points Of Gold.
She has taught creative writing for Teachers and Writers
Collective in New York City, as well as the University
of Washington and Mills College, and she currently
works at the Poetry Center here in Tucson.
Laynie Browne's work can be named
many things, um, reading her work I found that to be true.
Often, it contradicted itself again and again,
only arriving at the same place and a new place simultaneously.
It can be called conceptual, fanciful, deeply serious,
elusive, complex, playful, and deeply perceptive all
at the same time.
Creating worlds peopled with characters and corridors
of language, which build upon themselves
like labyrinths, verdant, thicket,
and hedge, behind which lays the complex relationships
between ideas, objects, human relationships,
and the continuous stream of data
we all encounter every day.
The skein of Laynie's poetry, a bundle or web
of numerous colors and fibers, always reveals itself
to us, her reader, imbued with a dye of her endless imagination
and for this we are grateful.
Please help me to welcome, Laynie.
[APPLAUSE]