Thank you all for being here tonight.
Much of the work that Letras Latinas does
wouldn't be possible without our institutional partnerships.
In the case of Latino Poetry Now, I'd like to single out,
first off, the Poetry Society of America
with whom this multi-year initiative was conceived back
in 2010.
But no less crucial have been our local partners.
We launched Latino Poetry Now in November of 2011
in collaboration with the Woodberry Poetry Room
at Harvard University.
In March of 2012, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social
Practice hosted us at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Last October, we were at Macalester College
in St Paul, Minnesota, welcomed by their English department.
I mentioned these specific collaborators
because I'm a big believer in documentation,
which leads me to briefly mention
another facet of this initiative.
In addition to these public multi-author events,
we have also been facilitating online roundtable discussions
where we invite each group of poets to write about their
and each other's work in dialogue.
These textual conversations are being published on the Poetry
Society of America website.
The one featuring tonight's artists is still in the works,
but we expect to post it very soon.
Tonight in a sense, we inaugurate the homestretch
in that this is the penultimate installment of Latino Poetry
Now, which concludes in late October--
next October at Notre Dame.
We are thrilled to be here in such a stunning space,
and I'd like to take a moment to thank the Poetry
Center at the University of Arizona,
in particular Cybele Knowles and Anne Doten.
I contacted Cybele well over a year ago,
and I remember thinking to myself
that it felt like we were planning a wedding.
[LAUGHTER]
A wedding with a twist in that tonight's nuptials
are a threesome.
[LAUGHTER]
And what a trio.
You'll hear more about them from Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
But I'll close by saying that when I curated tonight's slate,
I was thinking of how Latino poetry is becoming
less and less predictable.
And with that, I'll turn things over
to Josh, who graciously agreed to introduce our three poets--
J. Michael Martinez, Carmen Gimenez Smith,
and Roberto Tejada.
[APPLAUSE]