I'm delighted to introduce Carl Marcum to you.
Carl was born in Nogales, grew up in Tucson,
went to Salpointe school, did his undergraduate work here
and his MFA here, went on to distinguish himself
as a Stegner fellow at Stanford, and during his time
there, this wonderful book of his Cue Lazarus
was accepted by the University of Arizona Press.
Carl is extremely good-natured about admitting
the rough time we had when he took his first poetry
course from me.
I guess I was pretty hard on you,
but it paid off in the long run.
Carl has written a poetry that I think
is very new and very exciting, and he does something
which is extremely hard to do--
which is he combines formal and aesthetic invention
with a sense of politics and a sense of history.
But it's not a didactic sense.
It's a sense of really exploring the mystery
and the unknown of identity through looking at history.
So I'm excited about Carl's work,
and I'm very pleased to have you come and celebrate
with us the publication of his book, which
came out last February, March.
And so we're way overdue to welcome him back,
and we thank him for coming.
So he'll be reading from this book, as well
as some new poems, so please welcome back
to Tucson, Carl Marcum.
[APPLAUSE]