OK one more, and this is to welcome up
Rose Brandt, the publicity Manager at the U of A Press,
which has published the Poetry of Resistance Anthology.
Rose is going to introduce our speakers and our panelists
tonight.
Please help me welcome Rose Brandt.
[APPLAUSE]
You never feel as short in your life
after coming up here after Tyler, actually.
Thank you.
It's a tremendous honor to be here tonight
to introduce these commanding poets,
to see the power of poetry and the power of poetry
as a means of resistance recognized and celebrated.
Just six years after nine Latino students chained themselves
to the main doors of the Arizona State Capitol in an act
of civil disobedience to Arizona Senate Bill 1070,
Odilia Galván Rodríguez and the late Francisco Alarcón came
to us with an ambitious project.
Alarcón's response to these students' protest?
A poem penned in English and Spanish entitled
For the Capitol Nine had launched a Facebook page,
Poets Responding to SB 1070.
This page, really, this community,
grew to become a powerful and dynamic forum
for social justice.
It provided a home for more than 3,000 original contributions
from poets and artists from around the globe.
When Odilia and Francisco brought
us was what was to become Poetry of Resistance,
an anthology of more than 80 established and emerging
writers that collectively and powerfully articulates
the need for change and the primacy of basic human rights.
Francisco Alarcón passed away before having held this book
in his hands.
He was a poet who lived beyond borders.
His poetry straddled cultures and bridged generations.
His words are carried on and the spark
he ignited in the many readers, fellow writers,
and dreamers his life touched.
This is true I know, for the collection's co-editor,
and his longtime friend Odilia Galván Rodríguez,
who has taken it upon herself to see that Francisco's last work
carries on.
A community and a labor organizer herself,
Odilia Galván Rodríguez worked for such organizations
as the United Farm Workers of America, and the AFL-CIO,
in addition to being a poet, editor and creative writing
teacher.
Her family were farm workers.
Her father a steelworker.
She grew up in the projects on the South Side of Chicago,
among people of all backgrounds and all walks of life.
In a recent interview with Hip Latina,
she talked about her belief in solidarity
and the importance of not letting society
divide us along color lines.
She said we need to be unified always,
and we need to always be learning about each other,
and making family with each other.
I use my creative writing like I did my organizing,
to try to unite people.
Rodríguez is the author of four volumes of poetry.
Her latest, The Red Earth Calling,
Cantos for the 21st Century.
She also has her hand in many projects,
including curating "Love and Prayers for Fukushima, Japan,
World," a literary blog she founded
to highlight environmental and social justice issues, as well
as editing Cloud Women's Quarterly,
a journal of women's work from indigenous spiritual
traditions.
Having lived in Cuba, Brazil and Mexico,
her work is truly rooted in a global perspective
and shows her heartfelt dedication
to justice in a world that has become larger than borders.
Called by Sandra Cisneros the Pablo Neruda of North American
authors, Martín Espada has been a tenant lawyer, a bouncer,
a factory worker and the desk clerk at a transient hotel.
But he has always been a poet.
Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957.
His father, a community organizer,
founded the organization East New York Action,
and worked with the Civil Rights movement,
documenting the struggle with his camera.
Espada has said his father's work in photography
was attempting to humanize the dehumanized.
That's what you can do if you're a photographer or a poet.
Of his own work, he has said, my job
is to tell stories as vividly as possible.
To ground the narrative and the image
to the language of the senses, so you can hear it,
and taste it, and smell it.
Often fusing the personal and the political,
his latest collection of poems is called Vivas
to Those Who Have Failed.
Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball, The Republic
of Poetry, Alabanza, Imagine the Angels of Bread,
and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands.
He has received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert
Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center
Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim
Fellowship.
His book, The Republic of Poetry was a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize.
The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11,
has been widely anthologized and performed.
His book of essays, Zapata's Disciple,
was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American studies
program outlawed by the state of Arizona,
and has been issued in a new edition
by Northwestern University Press.
Espada is a professor of English at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst.
Mari Herreras is a fifth-generation Tucsonan,
whose heart and soul is happiest in Arizona
with her poetry, her son and partner, their cats, hiking
and exploring, and her amazing group of do-gooder friends
and coworkers.
She is a proud contributor to the Poetry
of Resistance anthology, and the former managing
editor of the Tucson Weekly.
She now works as Director of Organizing and Advocacy
at the Stand Together Arizona Advocacy and Training Center,
with YWCA southern Arizona.
Mari will lead us in--
lead the conversation with the poets
before they read from their work.
But first, the poets will get us started with a single poem.
Please join me in welcoming Mari Herreras,
Martín Espada and Odilia Galván Rodríguez.
[APPLAUSE]