Yá'át'ééh, buenas tardes.
I want to first give an acknowledgment
and shout out to our Tohono O'odham neighbors, whose
land were on, and thank them for taking care of it,
so that it takes care of us.
My intros are synced so that we can let
the powerful work speak to us.
I'm going to read in order of how
the readers are going to read.
Javier Zamora's debut collection, Unaccompanied,
was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017.
He's been a recipient of numerous prizes
and fellowships, including the Wallace Stegner, Canto Mundo,
the MacDowell Colony, the NEA, Poetry Foundation, and Yaddo,
to list a few.
He was most recently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
At nine-years-old, Zamora traveled, unaccompanied,
4,000 miles from El Salvador to the United States.
Zamora's poems inform us that we need to catch up
and realize the hateful border we've
allowed to be constructed across the periphery of our hearts
and politicized perceptions.
From the poem, "Saguaros," "And there, not the promised land,
but barbwire and barbwire with nothing growing under it."
Our second reader, Joseph Legaspi,
is co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization that
promotes and serves Asian-American writers
and writing.
His collections of poetry include,
Threshold, 2017; and Imago, 2017;
as well as the chapbook, Subways, 2013.
Legaspi's poems explore the liminal space
between conventionality and queerness,
country, family, and the temporality of love.
Born and raised in the Philippines,
Legaspi's family immigrated to LA when he was 12.
In the poem, "Feasting," he writes
of a stranger watching the butchering of a jackfruit,
"His tongue tingled ripley.
This country's foreign to me, he continued,
but I'm not foreign to it."
Perhaps this is liminal flavor of family and movement.
And finally, Kim Addonizio is the author
of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections,
and two books of writing poetry.
Her guide, The Poets Companion, created in collaboration
with Dorianne Laux, has often guided me
through the dark moments of curriculum development
and my own miserable uncertainty sitting at the desk.
She's been a finalist for the National Book Award
and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA
Fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize.
Addonizio's work shows us the paradoxical catalog
of romantic failures, makes boisterous the beauty
and absurdity of our lives, and it reminds us
of the grit required to create.
So please, help me welcome these three wonderful poets.
[APPLAUSE]