Hi, everyone.
I'm Diana Marie Delgado, the literary director
of the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
And I want to welcome everyone, to another episode
of the Institute for Inquiry and Poetics,
featuring ambassadors from our Art for Justice Initiative.
The Institute for Inquiry and Poetics
founded at the University of Arizona Poetry Center
is a thought center designed to create space and time for poets
to respond to pressing questions that
reside at the intersection of social concern and poetry.
Encouraging interdisciplinary modalities
and investigative research, the Institute
will ask poets a series of questions and digitally
archive their responses on poetry.arizona.edu in addition
to YouTube and the Center's archive Voca.
Tonight I'm very excited to host a reading with our very close
partner Reginald Dwayne Betts.
Dwayne Betts is a poet and the director of the Million Book
Project, an initiative out of the Yale Law School's Justice
Collaboratory to radically transform the access
to literature in prisons.
The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry,
his latest collection of poetry, Felon,
explores the post incarceration experience
and lingering consequences of a criminal record.
In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award
in the essays and criticism category for his New York Times
Magazine essay that chronicles his journey
from prison to becoming a licensed attorney.
Dwayne has become an integral part of Art
for Justice, which is a three year project that commissions
new work from leading writers in conversation
with the crisis of mass incarceration in the United
States.
All with the goal of creating new awareness and empathy
through presentation and publication.
Thank you, Dwayne, for being here with us tonight.
It's my pleasure.
It's my pleasure, always.
Thank you so much.
I also want to give a special thanks
to TJ Hill, our producer, the Ford Foundation,
and the entire team at the University of Arizona Poetry
Center.
Kima Jones who have helped make this reading possible.
In our program tonight, we also have another special guest
who will be introducing Dwayne.
And that is both a colleague of mine
and local Tucsonian, Joe Watson.
Joe Watson is a formerly incarcerated writer
and media professional who works as a communications
director for the Pima County attorney's office in Tucson,
Arizona.
Since his release from prison in 2017
after serving more than 10 years inside,
Joe has advocated for sentencing reform and greater access
to re-entry resources, organized around prosecutorial reform,
and leads a free monthly workshop at the Poetry
Center called Free Time.
He enlists community members to help mentor incarcerated
writers, and it's a very successful workshop.
So thank you, Joe, for being here with us tonight.
And thank you for introducing Dwayne.