Good evening.
Welcome.
A few announcements of upcoming events and other notable things
you will want to know.
On March 27, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes will be here
and will be reading.
That will be Wednesday night, March 27, 8:00 PM.
She'll also be conducting an open session.
And you can look for a notice of that in the creative writing
office in the Poetry Center.
And the contest awards winner of the annual Poetry Center
Student Contest will be reading here on April 3.
Those who received awards and honorable mentions
will all be reading.
And the long awaited annual Tucson Poetry Festival IX is
coming up on April 5 through 7.
The theme this year is Poetry in Jazz.
It will feature Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman,
Joy Harjo, Cynthia Hogue, and jazz pianist Cecil Taylor.
There should be a poster out for that in, I think,
a couple of weeks.
So be looking for that.
We do have, for sale after the reading tonight, copies
of the Sonora Review 10th anniversary issue, as well
as some back issues.
And we'll have copies of three of Phillip Lopate's books,
Being With Children, Against Joie de Vivre,
and Bachelorhood.
Those are for sale in the corridor,
10% off, from the ASUA bookstore.
Phillip Lopate is the author of seven books,
including works of poetry, fiction, and personal essays.
In 1975, he published Being With Children,
which came out of his experience as a poet in the schools,
working through the Teachers & Writers
Collaborative in New York City.
That book has recently been reprinted,
and it served as the opening by which he became,
as his friend Vivian Gornick describes
him, "one of the most interesting and significant
writers of the personal essay."
His two most recent collections are
Against Joie de Vivre and Bachelorhood, both
published in 1989.
In an open session yesterday, Lopate
described the personal essay as "using the self
to fetch the subject and as a means
to face the catastrophe of personality."
His essay, "Chekhov for Children,"
in which he recounts the experience of guiding
a group of sixth graders through a dynamic performance of,
not Peter Pan, but Uncle Vanya, is
emblematic of the lively intelligence, nerve, and vision
he brings to his own art.
Please welcome Phillip Lopate.
[APPLAUSE]