Really happy to have this crowd here tonight.
Thanks everybody for coming.
Glad that it's not quite as cold as it was yesterday.
It feels pretty nice right now in Tucson.
Thanks for choosing to come to a poetry reading tonight.
I want to tell you a little bit about this poetry reading.
It's a little bit different than some of the others
that have happened here at the Poetry Center.
It's connected to a larger project.
And I want to talk a little bit about that,
tell you about what to expect this evening.
Talk a little bit about what's upcoming at the Poetry Center,
and then get out of the way, because everybody
else who's coming after me as so much more exciting than I am.
This project tonight, Randall is here.
Randall Horton is here.
He's helping kick off a project at the Poetry Center
that we're calling the Art for Justice Project.
How many of you have heard about this project already?
Any of you?
Some of you have.
OK, good.
I'm glad you have.
If you haven't, here's what's happening.
The Poetry Center has some funding
from a grant of the Art for Justice Fund.
And the funding is to investigate the legacy of--
and the policy of mass incarceration
on contemporary American life and on our future.
On both of those things.
That legacy for how it impacts us now,
and how it might impact us how we
imagine things going forward.
It's one of our most vexing social, cultural, and political
problems, and it's very much our problem.
I use that word intentionally.
And my challenge to you over this reading
and the others that will come in this series,
is to think about that problem and how you will respond to it.
Because how we respond, I think, largely
defines who we are as a country, as individuals, as a city,
as a state, and there's a role that you can play.
But you have to imagine that it's your problem too.
And that's one of the hopes that these readings will
make obvious to us over time, is that will help understand that
and think about it.
Randall has written 20 new pages of work
that's being presented tonight for the first time,
and we're so excited.
This is the debut.
So the premiere.
And so welcome to the premiere.
And we're so excited about this project.
Each of the readers who are coming in this project
will be bringing new work that they've
written in response to the prompts
to their thinking about these issues
when they come to Tucson.
So we're so excited about that.
I want to give a special thanks to the project partners
at the Poetry Center who are helping work on this project,
and guide the work of this grant.
And that's Diana Delgado, our literary director
who's over here.
Two partners who are far away but who are close,
and who will preside tonight as well.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Kima Jones
are both project partners helping us
imagine the shape of this work.
And then also Joe Watson, who's here in the front as well.
More about Joe in a second.
There's three more presentations in this series in the spring.
The Art for Justice readings are nestled within the larger
reading series at the Poetry Center,
so you'll see these in sequence over the next three years,
and they will come up.
So we've got one this fall.
Randall's kicking us off.
We've got three more in the spring.
And that's Nikky Finney who's reading
in February with new work.
Patrick Rosal and Evie Shockley, a reading in March,
and then the poet Natalie Diaz is coming down from Phoenix,
and she's going to read for us in April.
I think I just said Phoenix, which I didn't mean to say.
No one's probably ever said it that way ever.
Joe is working on a project-- the grant's
larger than these commissions.
And so there's other pieces and parts of it.
I won't go into all of it.
But I want to talk about the project
that-- one of the projects Joe is helping us with.
And that is a project that's connected
to an app called Flikshops.
And Flikshops are a way that you can send messages
into writers who are currently systems involved.
And so it comes out as a postcard.
It's an ability to take a picture,
send a quote, or something that's
happening at these readings, and share that message with writers
who are currently inside.
And we're excited about that bridge between what's
happening here in this space, and the things
that we're thinking about, and how
we may take that conversation more broadly with other writers
who can't be here.
And we're hopeful about that.
In connection to that, to those Flikshops,
we're excited about the correspondence
that's going to come back to us and those conversations.
And so starting in the new year in January,
the first will be January 26.
It's a Saturday.
It'll be a sequence of Saturdays once a month.
We'll be having a community workshop here
at the Poetry Center that will be focused on mentorship
of writers who are responding to those Flikshops,
and also just correspondence.
And if you're interested in that,
it's meant to be a drop-in experience.
Those are, again, on Saturdays in the new year.
That'll start January 26, and I hope that you'll come and take
part in those.
You'll hear more about it on the Poetry Center's emails
and social media.
We have an opener tonight, and each of these readings
and the Art for Justice program will
have an opener that's connected to work
that's happening in Tucson around the issues that
are concerned with the grant.
And Joe is helping us curate this as our community
engagement specialist.
And so he's helped invite Ojalá Systems that's here tonight.
We talked about how to introduce them,
and they're excited just to introduce themselves.
So they're going to show you what they do, and they're
going to perform for about 20 minutes before Randall reads.
My colleague Julie Johnson here at the Poetry Center
on our library staff will come up and introduce Randall
in between Ojalá's performance and Randall's reading.
So without further ado, I want to welcome up Ojalá Systems
to come perform for us.
Thank you for being here.