Welcome, good evening.
I'd like to make a few announcements before tonight's
event about upcoming events.
Next Wednesday night, at 8 o'clock,
the Poetry Center will be sponsoring a reading
by the winners of the annual student poetry contest.
That's going to be held in Kiva Auditorium,
in the education building.
That's a change in location.
So everybody make a note of that.
And let's see, what else is coming up?
The following Wednesday, April 10th, Alan Dugan
will be reading here--
a senior statesman of the poetry anti-establishment
not to be missed.
And on Tuesday, April 16, an event
which is not scheduled in our spring flyer,
there'll be a reading by Sandra Cisneros.
That will be 7:30, Tuesday, April 16, again,
in Kiva Auditorium, in the education building.
And in this season of frantic poetry events,
one must not forget the Tucson Poetry Festival, which
will be running next weekend, April 5th through 7th,
and will feature Allen Gisberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka,
Joy Harjo, and Cynthia Hogue, among others.
Tonight, I'm very pleased to be able to introduce to you
Lorna Dee Cervantes.
She began writing poetry, I found out
during her visit, when she was eight years old,
went into a poetic frenzy in her adolescence,
writing five poems a day while she was in high school.
Her first book, Emplumada, was published in 1981,
by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
That was a book that explored her experience growing up
in San Jose, California as a Chicana
and Native American woman.
It will tell you something about her focus and determination
at an early age to know that the powerful poem in that book,
"Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,"
was a work that she started when she was 17
and finished when she was 20.
She had the courage to walk away from her poetry for five years,
to study for a PhD at the University of California
at Santa Cruz, in the History of Consciousness program.
She also has found time to establish a press, The Mango
Press, which she started in 1976, which
has published a very notable series of chapbooks
by Chicano writers.
Early on, she picked up people like Alberto Rios and Sandra
Cisneros.
She's currently a professor at the University
of Colorado in Boulder.
Her new book, forthcoming from Arte Publico Press,
is titled From the Cables of Genocide--
Poems of Love and Hunger.
Please welcome Lorna Dee Cervantes.
[APPLAUSE]