Hi, everyone.
Welcome to the Poetry Center.
We're very excited for tonight's reading
with Lehua Taitano and Bojan Louis,
who will be reading for about 20 minutes, each of them.
We're going to have Lehua read first,
and then Bojan will read after.
Before we begin, I have a few announcements, one of which
is I'm Diana Delgado.
I'm the literary director here at the Poetry Center.
Yay!
One year down.
[APPLAUSE]
I arrived June and then, you know, desert took over.
So a few things is, for those of you,
if you're looking for something to do in the Arizona
heat, Wednesday, July 31, we have our last summer social,
which is a Whitman summer social,
and it's going to be poetry selections from the Arizona
Friends of Chamber Music, and that's
going to be over at the Copper Room at Hotel Congress,
Wednesday, July 31 at 5:30.
So come by.
And then the other thing I wanted to mention
is that we offer classes and workshops here at the Poetry
Center.
I'm not sure if everyone knows that,
but every season we have at least four to five classes
that we offer.
And we also offer scholarships, so if you
feel that you're in need of a scholarship, all you need to do
is apply.
Our scholarship deadline is going to be Tuesday, July 30.
So definitely you can go online, look
at the classes you'd like to take,
apply for the scholarship, and then we take it from there.
So to begin, I'm going to introduce Lehua,
a very short, brief introduction,
and then Susan Briante will be introducing Bojan Louis.
And don't forget, we have books for sale, always, to my right.
"Trust with your skin.
Lehua Taitano, being a spring, one
can propose that in this world there are two main actions--
that of coming together, and the other of coming apart.
In her two poetry collections, "A Bell Made of Stones,"
"TinFish 2013," and "Inside Me an Island,"
WordTech Editions, 2018, Taitano's poetry both
assembles and pushes, fracturing the land and her identities
until each are free.
And in those same actions, rooted
in healing and acknowledgment of her Chamoru heritage,
she juxtaposes the world we stand on,
and just like in her poem "Estuary,"
the feathered word that hums about us, between us,
is unmoored."
Lehua.
[APPLAUSE]
You're welcome.
I'm back.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.