Good evening, everyone.
Can you hear me?
My name is Anne Breckenridge Barrett.
I'm the director of the Center for Creative Photography.
And I am very pleased to welcome you here this evening.
And I'm incredibly excited and honored to welcome Kim
Addonizio, Joseph Legaspi, and Javier Zamora
to the Center for our second in a series of poetry readings
that accompany the exhibition Portraits of Poetry:
photographs by BA Van Sise.
Now, that exhibitions open through November 23rd.
And it also has an accompanying exhibition in the Heritage
gallery, which is a complement to Edward Weston's Leaves
of Grass, and that's open through November 30th.
I want to take a minute to acknowledge
the collaboration between the Center
for Creative Photography and the Poetry Center
and how wonderfully our staffs have worked together.
The programming staffs are amazing.
And if you've never been to the Center welcome.
We absolutely have a membership program,
and you're welcome to ask any of us about it.
But without further ado, it's my absolute pleasure
to introduce my colleague Tyler Meier, the director
of the Poetry Center.
How many of you are not members of the CCP?
Oh, good, you all have work to do,
and you can do it on the way out.
Thanks, everybody, for coming.
We're really happy to see such a crowd here.
Thanks for being in this space and welcoming these poets
to Tucson or back to Tucson.
We're really pleased and excited that they're here,
and of course, they're all connected to the exhibit
that Anne mentioned, which if you haven't had a chance to see
it, it's such a singular, and delightful,
and remarkable exhibit.
And I hope you'll make time to do it.
If you have seen it, I hope y'all catch it again before it
has to come down and the next shows go up,
so please take advantage of that.
I'm going to segue just to mention this.
There's another way you can experience that exhibit
in this form, which is brand new, hot off the press,
it smells great, and it's the book,
it's called Children of Grass.
And it collects all of the images that
are in the exhibit as well as a few others
by the photographer BA Van Sise.
This book launches to the world on September 24th,
but because of Arizona's funky daylight savings,
it's available here now and to you today.
So if you want to experience the future today,
this is available for purchase before the rest of the world
can get it.
It's a beautiful book.
It's really well-made, and has, again,
all of the poems and all of the images
that are part of the exhibit.
So I hope you'll do that.
It's been lovely for me to have this as a thing
to look at as a way to also remember what's on the walls
here.
I'll just mention quickly that there's another quick poetry
reading coming up soon at the Center on September 26th
and that's with two poets, the poet Patricia Smith
and the poet Angel Nafis.
And that's at 7 o'clock back at the Poetry Center.
We have three poets here tonight,
and we've decided that they're going
to read in alphabetical order of their first names.
And so, Javier is going to go first, then Joseph,
and then Kim.
And to help introduce them, we are
going to introduce my new colleague here
at the University of Arizona, Bojan Louis.
But before I do that, I just want
to echo any sentiments about the chance
to collaborate between cultural institutions at the U of A.
These are two of the most exciting.
I'm a little bit opinionated, but these
are two of the most exciting cultural institutions that we
have, period.
They happen to be on this campus.
It's really exciting to work together
to collaborate in a visionary way about what we might
be able to do together, and it's been really, really fun
to do this around poetry, and to have this celebrate poets,
and celebrate photography.
And so, we're so excited about that.
Oh, and I see one note here.
I just want to acknowledge, too, my boss is here and that's AP.
And he's the Dean of the College of Humanities,
and he's wonderful.
So we're grateful for his support.
And I wanted to introduce Bojan, who
is the author of the poetry collection Currents, which won
the 2018 American Book Award.
He's just joined the creative writing faculty here
at the U of A and also the Department of American Indian
Studies.
He's teaching amazing courses.
We're so excited to have him here in Tucson.
It's really exciting.
Please let me welcome Bojan.
Thank you.