Buenas noches.
Good evening, everyone.
It's good to be here on this inaugural return, I guess.
I want to thank you all for being here.
Thanks to Tyler, Paola and Diana.
In fact, to all the Poetry Center and any university staff
whose labor is invisible to us here tonight,
but whose work also went into making this evening
special for us.
I'm especially grateful to Diana whose invitation gave me
the opportunity, gifted me the opportunity to immerse myself
in Laurie Ann Guerrero's words, her poetry
essays and her readings, lyrical rootings in place
over and across time.
She's a lover of words.
A kind of geo-choreographer who in dancing on the page
and on the stage moves us over cultural landscapes, and time
scapes, and territories of the heart.
Everyday histories and history makers,
she's elegantly attentive to the elemental.
She is, as so many of you know, a poet, a gorgeous poet.
She is also a grace giving pedagogue whose pedagogy
is an homenaje to traditional home knowledges
and our antepasados, our elders, including the trees.
Hers is a pedagogy inflected with the spirit
of those fierce feminists and women of color mujeristas, who
have long called us to claim our education.
An inspiration for all who teach, and especially for those
of us who are called to teach at a land
grant institution, an Hispanic serving institution
on unceded Indigenous territories.
She encourages her writing students
to understand that they're not here
to receive their education.
No, she says.
Rather, build upon the lessons distilled through generations
to give their own inherent knowing
in return in the name of something far greater.
For her, education seems to imply
a reciprocal relationship.
There's hope in her pedagogy and a deep, abiding respect.
These words I've shared with you are from her poem
Between The Soil and The Sun, where she also writes,
"it's the history in your hands."
This line suggest each student arrives with something to offer
and whatever they hold on to from their educational
experience will be added to what they arrived with,
which to her is never nothing.
Recognizing the history in your hands
is another way to honor our abuelitos,
our abuelitas as the makers, the holders of history,
historical actors in and from our own homes, our comunidades.
This poem appears alongside two other poems whose authors
are first generation students.
Zine writers, new poets, this is another mark of Laurie's work.
Expansive and elegant.
She makes space through her words
and her actions for the emergent, the everlasting,
and the everyday.
Her poetry highlights tracings from the past that
linger imperceptibly sometimes, but she reminds
us that's with us still.
She says be ready to cough up songs, corridos plucked first
by a revolutionary whose gun smoke you wear in your hair.
Such sensual imagery.
She writes of the spoken and sometimes unspoken, but ever
present lingering wisdom of our antepasados.
You hear that so clearly in her words.
The grandmothers know what the trees know,
but they're not speaking either.
Her work makes place based meaning.
It probes the contradictions of different memorializations.
In How To Sacrifice Your Son she writes,
"kiss the tiny fingers he'll wrap around triggers
made for killing boys."
These words, connected to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
untethered, float as admonitions for this moment, too.
She notes in part 4 of Stealing The Crown: Sonnet
as Reconciliation that by writing she learns who she is.
I believe in us reading her work,
we can get closer to who we are.
It's a pleasure, a delight, and honor
to introduce Laurie Ann Guerrero to you
tonight, born and raised in the south side of San Antonio.
She's the author of Babies Under The Skin, A Tongue in the Mouth
of the Dying, A Crown for Gumecindo,
a collaboration with visual artist Marceo Montoya,
and I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake.
She holds a BA in English language
and literature from Smith College, and an MFA in poetry
from Drew University.
She's an associate professor and the writer in residence
of at Texas A & M San Antonio.
In 2014, she was appointed poet laureate in the city of San
Antonio by former Mayor Julián Castro.
She was shortly after appointed poet laureate
of the state of Texas.
And I'm sad that Diana stole this from me.
Maybe I stole it from her.
I don't-- we'll have to battle that out some time,
but Laurie Ann Guerrero is in two words bad ass.
Please join me in welcoming Laurie Ann.
[APPLAUSE]