Thank you, Tyler.
Thank you, Hannah.
Thank you Poetry Center for being
such a great anchor in the literary culture
of this city in this school.
We're always so grateful to be a part of what you do.
So I will be brief.
But I do want to acknowledge this
is the last event of the prose series for this year.
I know some of you were hoping to hear
Julie Iromuanya, our brand new fiction faculty member.
And poor Julie had a sudden invitation
to go to Camargo in Southern France
to work on her next novel.
So we said, "OK."
But you will get to hear Julie reading in the fall.
And we were thrilled that this opened an opportunity for us
to invite Brian Blanchfield into the series.
A writer who's already contributed so much
to writing and to this community and you'll
hear more about that with the introductions.
I do want to mention these wonderful broadsides
one for each author, made by Ander Monson
and these are available gratis to you, please pick one up.
The authors will be more than happy to sign them
with a very fancy silver felt, fat pen.
It will be something you will treasure surely.
So the shape of the evening is this.
First, we will have Brian Blanchfield
and then we will have Fenton Johnson
and then we will have celebration and book signing.
Our introducers tonight are two of
our other beloved and distinguished writers
in this community.
Introducing Brian Blanchfield will
be Ander Monson, the extraordinary poet, fiction
writer, essayist, editor, publisher, maker of broadsides,
and wearer of spectacular pants.
He will be introducing Brian.
And introducing Fenton, an equally spectacular, if
slightly more quietly dressed Aurelie Sheehan.
A beloved writer of stories, novels,
things that you can't describe as either fiction
or nonfiction.
They're just dazzling to read.
And also a great mythologizer of Speedway Boulevard.
If you haven't read that book.