Emily Dickinson and Charles Alexander concert,
I guess I am.
We keep referring to the t-shirts
we made tonight as our concert t-shirt.
So check out our concert t-shirts
at the merch table here.
I'm Lisa Bowden.
I'm the publisher of Kore Press.
And I want to welcome everybody here
to the amazing, fabulous Poetry Center.
The Poetry Center is our library partner in this extravaganza.
And we have a high school partner in Tucson, High Magnet
School.
If you want any additional information
about the fabulous Poetry Center.
You can see Jesse or Gayle, perhaps over here at the table.
And yay for us.
This is a really thrilling event.
The first of maybe 25 and counting.
That momentum just keeps building.
So put your seatbelts on.
I want to acknowledge Dean Mary Wildner-Basset, who
helped us launch our event about 20 minutes ago with a ribbon
cutting ceremony.
We appreciate our partnership with the College of Humanities.
I also want to recognize [? Shawn ?] [? Gusler, ?] who
is a member of Gabby Giffords staff,
who's here with us this evening representing Gabby's office.
Thank you very much for coming, [? Shawn. ?]
So this is the Big Read.
This is our kickoff event for the Big Read.
It's the first time the Big Read has been held in Tucson.
It's a reading initiative funded by the NEA.
And they did a study in 2004 across the nation
and found that reading for pleasure, reading literature,
literary reading, poetry reading was in sharp decline,
especially among teens and at risk readers.
I guess that's the same thing, but also--
So part of what they're doing-- what we're doing here together
is inspiring people to read and have a lot of fun doing it.
So that's not just newspapers and the internet.
So since 2007, they've issued 950 grants.
Their first year, they did a pilot in 10 cities
across the nation.
This is the first time it's been in Tucson, as I've said.
So we're just thrilled to be kind of the cheerleaders here.
So thank you very much for coming.
So this program runs starting today through December 10.
December 10 is Emily Dickinson's birthday.
We'll be concluding with a public birthday party
downtown on that second Saturday,
maybe in the Fox Theater.
We don't know exactly where we'll be downtown
but we'll be downtown.
We have lots of free things to give you,
especially if you're an educator.
We're partnering with probably five or six high schools
that we know of so far, including
Marana and Sells Middle School and Sells Community College.
Sherwin Bitsui will be a poet in residence going out there
and working with those kids.
Tucson High, City High, Catalina Foothills High School,
University High.
And the list is sort of growing.
So for you educators out there, please
visit our table in the back.
We have readers, guys, free for you.
We have audio CDs here for you that are for free.
Those.
Are for anybody please help yourself and spread the word.
We also have teachers guides as well.
The Big Read aims to address the crisis
that I mentioned earlier about the reading
for pleasure and great decline.
And it addresses it squarely and effectively.
It provides citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss
a single book, or in this case a body of a particular poet's
work within their communities.
The initiative was developed to answer that big need.
The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment
for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.
Kore Press is one of 76 organizations
nationwide this year to host a Big Read.
The National project, which as I said,
seeks to revitalize the role of literature
and instill a lifelong love of reading in American culture
began in 2006.
This evening's event is sponsored in part
by Poets & Writers magazine.
And we just are deeply grateful for our partnership with the UA
Poetry Center.
Thank you very much, Cybele, for putting up
with my hundreds of emails the last few weeks
or months actually.
So we've developed, as I said, about 25 events
over the next 10 weeks using the poetry and letters
of the amazing visionary 19th century poet Emily Dickinson.
And we do this to galvanize our community in positive ways
with reading, with book discussions,
with curriculum in high school, with writing workshops in Sells
and Marana, with Slamming Emily workshops at four
public libraries with a 21st century translation
workshop at Casa Libre, where over the course of four hours
people will be translating Dickinson into text language
and all kinds of fun things, and the language of punctuation,
with high school readings, with theatrical performances
of youths writing.
TXT Emily is a project of the Big Read Tucson exhibition.
Baking because Dickinson was a baker and loved that.
We have free books.
We have community performances.
Dances are being made.
Music as being composed.
There will be soon poems on Sun Tran buses.
And we're also recording the voices of as many Tucsonans who
want to come and read Dickinson out loud your poem of choice,
or a letter, or fragment.
That sort of reading project is happening out
loud at Hotel Congress stage.
Stay tuned.
Please visit our website.
What else can I say?
I think that's enough.
Thank you.
I invite each of you to become a big reader.
The next three months read out loud to each other.
Read out loud to yourself.
Read in the shower if you want to.
Come to events, let us record your voices.
Please sign up for our mailing list.
So I'm thrilled to introduce Charles Alexander, who's
a teacher and mentor of mine.
And he's an independent scholar and just amazing poet
and force in the community, who's also
a great lover of Dickinson.
Charles Alexander is the founder and director of Chax press
in Tucson, where he has lived all but three
of the past 27 years.
His books include "Hopeful Buildings",
"Arc of Light/Dark Matter", "Near or Random Acts",
and "Certain Slants", which includes
30 sections of an ongoing work called "Pushing Water."
He is recipient of the Distinguished Arizona Arts
Award and is a former director of Minnesota Center
for the Book Arts, of Black Mesa Press,
and of the Tucson Poetry Festival.
In the summer of 2007, he was a participant
in the Tamaas poetry translation seminar in Paris, France.
He is currently at work on a book
about the pleasures of poetry, which is largely
why we are here tonight.
Alexander has taught courses on Emily Dickinson
for the U of A Poetry Center, the Learning Curve,
and for the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
And I'm sure the list goes on.
Please help me welcome Charles Alexander.
[APPLAUSE]