All right, everyone.
Let's all bring our conversations
to a close please.
Thank you.
It's so awesome though to hear your voices
and to be here in community with you just
talking to one another.
My name is Diana Delgado.
I'm the literary director here at the Poetry Center.
And I'm really, really honored tonight to host Victoria Chang.
I do-- I do want to just say thank you for coming here
tonight to be with us while we celebrate
the work of Victoria Chang.
But I also want to acknowledge that the University of Arizona
community is still processing from a tragedy that occurred
here on campus yesterday.
I really hope that tonight's reading
can bring us closer together in solidarity,
in opposition to violence, and really
encourage us to communicate with one another
and hold each other in support in these times
when I think it's really important for us
to hold space for one another.
So I just want to thank you all for being here with us tonight
to celebrate Victoria and also to be here together in a place
that I feel we really want to promote safety
and just togetherness here at the Poetry Center.
So thank you.
A few just housekeeping things.
Please shut off your phones and that includes the ringers,
please.
Whichever of the two is going to work for you.
Also please unwrap any candies that you have,
any bags or toiletries, or things
that you're going to dig into, maybe just get it out now.
That will be helpful for all of us.
The other thing is we have books for sale.
We have beautiful books by Victoria that are for sale.
This is one of them, which is it's just gorgeous.
The Trees Witness Everything.
We have three of those books they're
for sale, which Victoria will be signing after the reading.
So thank you, Victoria.
I now want to remind everybody that next Thursday at the HSIB
building, so please do not show up at the Poetry Center,
we will be hosting Rita Dove on Thursday, October 13.
It's going to be a very big reading just like this reading.
But we just want to encourage everyone
to just understand that it's not here
because we've had that happen.
Because people are so used to coming here.
But it's going to be further down this way to the left.
Just go straight, left, and you'll be at the HSIB building.
That's next Thursday.
OK.
I would like to share a few words about our introducer
tonight Ander Monson.
Ander Monson's most recent books are Predator: A Memoir,
a Movie, an Obsession, I Will Take the Answer,
and The Gnome Stories which are all published by Graywolf.
Yeah.
Awesome.
He edits the magazine DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, New Michigan
Press, the Assessment Matters Institute, which
is one of my favorites, let me tell you,
always liking that whatever you do with that Institute,
and March Madness, among other projects.
And, of course, he teaches here at the University of Arizona.
I want I want to welcome Ander Monson up
to introduce Victoria Chang.
Thank you, Ander.
[APPLAUSE]