Welcome, everyone.
As you can see, we've been busy over at the Poetry Center,
and we are thrilled to collaborate with the Tucson
Humanities Festival for tonight's event to celebrate
the force that is Rita Dove.
Sorry, I'm a little bit nervous.
I've read and followed Rita for so long,
and now she's here in person, and it's bananas for me.
So thank you for just bearing with my nervousness.
I'm going to try and be as brief as I can
so that we can focus on Rita's reading tonight.
But before I do that, I want to just bring up and invite up
to the mic two individuals that I
will be sharing a little bit about them first,
and then I'll invite them up.
So I would first like to briefly introduce Michael Spurgeon
and Stephanie Robbins.
After I hear a bit about them, I'd like to invite Michael up,
and then I would like Stephanie to come up to introduce Rita.
Michael is the director of the Borchard Center on Literary
Arts, and it is a foundation that
works to create a community of literary artists
from across the Americas to foster meaningful connections
between people, cultures, and the natural world
by offering prizes, fellowship, and an annual 2-week retreat
for recipients in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
The Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts
encourages fellowships among leading practitioners and seeds
the creation of new work.
And after this reading if you have time,
please go to their website to check out some of the artists
that they are curating and supporting.
It's just a spectacular list.
The next person I want to share a bit about
is Dr. Stephanie Troutman Robbins, she/her,
who is a Black feminist scholar, mother of three,
and first-generation college student.
She is a department head of Gender and Women's Studies
at the University of Arizona and is also
an associate professor at the Gender
and Women's Studies in English.
I will be returning back to the stage
at the very end of the reading just
to share a bit about book sales and how we're
going to do that in a little bit about our upcoming event
with Sandra Cisneros, which will be coming up
in about three weeks.
So for right now, I'd like to invite Michael up.
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]