Good evening, everyone.
Oops, my voice is really scratchy.
It's just not even there.
Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to the Poetry Center on this beautiful night.
This is the first time I've been in the room after over 2 years.
So this is a very big event.
So I just want to give around warm of applause to all of us
for just coming together again in community here tonight.
It's been a lot of tough times, but I'm
happy to be here with you all in Tucson.
For those of you who don't know me,
I'm the literary director here, and I'm honored tonight to host
poets Carl Marcum and Laurie Ann Guerrero
as part of our reading and lecture series.
I just have a few things before we begin,
just so that you know kind of how the night will go.
I want to remind everyone that our next reading will occur
on Thursday, December 2nd, and we'll be hosting Jericho Brown,
so please come out for that.
That's going to be a really beautiful event.
I also want to share with everyone that tonight's event
is a co-reading, and part of the co-reading
is that it is a Tom Sanders Memorial Reading.
And I just want to share a few things who
Tom Sanders was, and just so you'll have an idea about that.
So it was established by the generosity of Tom's friends
in 2017, and this event features writers
who were former students at the University of Arizona, writers
who were formerly or currently members
of the University of Arizona faculty, or University
of Arizona Press authors.
So Carl Marcum is an alum of the UA Creative Writing Program.
He actually studied with Alison Deming,
so he's here on behalf of that to honor
the memory of Tom Sanders.
And if you'd like to read more about Tom Sanders,
please go to our website.
We have a lot of just information
about his life and just his spirit and how generous he was.
The reading order is going to be Adela Licona introducing Laurie
Ann Guerrero, and then we'll have Alison Deming come up
and introduce Carl Marcum.
And before I bring up--
I'm sorry, before I bring up Adela,
I just want to say a few words about Adela,
and then also Alison just so you guys know just
who is introducing who because it's just such
an honor because we have so many badasses on stage tonight.
That it's like, I'm trying to navigate all this badass stuff
here to share with you so you know
who it is that's in the house.
So just a few words about Adela Licona.
Adela Licona is basically the visionary
behind the Art for Change Agency, which
serves and supports critical voices
and creative visions working individually
and through academic grassroots and
other organizational engagements and affiliations
for social change.
This agency started in an attempt
to support and promote just meaningful and joyful ways
of working.
Adela brings decades of experience
in higher education, feminist and intersectional leadership,
community organizing, creative collaboration
in the arts to academics and creative writers,
artists, and activists.
So that is just a shortened bio.
But if you also want to know more, head to her website--
the Art of Change Agency and you will know more,
and maybe you could even work with Adela
if you are lucky enough because we're currently
working with her, and it's just been an honor.
So that's Adela.
The other person I want to say a few words about before Adela
comes up and introduces Laurie Ann Guerrero
is about Alison Hawthorne Deming who grew up in Connecticut.
And if you have not already picked it up,
her new nonfiction book, "A Woven World: On Fashion,
Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress,"
which was published by Counterpoint Press in 2021.
So if you don't have that book, you should get that book.
That's another amazing thing that you want
to make sure that you pick up.
Her other books of poetry, she has many,
is 2016 "Stairway to Heaven" and "Death Valley: Painted Light,"
which is a collaboration actually with photographer
Stephen Strom.
She has an essay collection, "Zoologies:
On Animals and the Human Spirit,"
which was published in 2014.
She's a Guggenheim Fellow, the author of "Science
and Other Poems," winner of the Walt Whitman
Award from the Academy of American Poets,
and a whole bunch of other amazing things.
So I'll just stop there.
But anyway, just we need to recognize that.
Before Adela comes up, I would just
like to say, please buy books.
We've had a long hiatus.
This is something really special for us to come together,
and it's really great to be able to meet the author
and to have them here in person.
And Carl Marcum's most recent book is "A Camera Obscura."
So I brought that up, so you could see it.
It's right over here.
And then Laurie Ann Guerrero has a series
of selected poems as part of the TCU Texas Poet Laureate Series.
And this is a really beautiful read hardback book.
It kind of looks like the Bible or something.
It just looks very, very official.
I think Carl Jung's "Red Book," it's similar to that color.
But anyway, please buy books.
And I'll leave you to Adela now.
Thank you, everyone.
[APPLAUSE]