Good evening.
I'm Bojan Louis.
I'm just going to start with some
of Tito's recent publications and achievements.
Otherwise, we'd be here all night.
Alberto Ríos's most recent work is Not Go Away Is My Name:
Poems and A Map of All Good Things, a novel.
Recipient of a PEN Beyond Margins
award, Western Literature Association's Distinguished
Achievement Award, a Rocky Mountain Emmy award,
and a finalist for the National Book Award,
Ríos teaches at Arizona State University,
is Arizona's inaugural poet laureate, a recent chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets and director
of the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing.
I didn't teach Tito, like the other introducers here.
Rather I was Tito's student when I was in the MFA at ASU.
And I was super excited to be able to study with someone
who I considered an Arizona guy, like we could converse
and relate in a different way.
We could sort of suspend the discussions of the illusion
and disillusion of the Wild West that this Southwest place holds
and cut the bullshit, right?
I owe Tito a whole lot.
He's guided me through my career.
And aside from teaching me like I'm working on a project
or I'm working on a book, he taught me
that to think longer and further like I'm cultivating a life.
I'm cultivating a life of work.
And I see that in his work.
He published his short stories, essays, poems.
And I didn't know what I was going to write.
I couldn't even think of where to begin to reflect
on my relationship with Tito.
Mainly because I think it just means so much to me,
and my toddler stole my iPad.
[LAUGHS] But one of my earliest memories of Tito
is sitting in his office when I really just like kind of
worked up the guts to go and sit and talk with him.
And what we talked about for like an hour
was the Steegmuller translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
And we just like went page by page for a bit.
And he pushed me real hard, just like Cynthia Hogue,
who's in the audience as well.
They told me like I wasn't good.
They told me I was doing fine.
But that I needed to work harder.
And they gave me mountains and mountains of books to read,
and I read them all.
And I remember Tito gave me--
instead of like telling me what I should do in my revision,
he just gave me a packet of revision exercises.
And said, this is what you should probably try and do.
And I did all of them.
And I'm able to stand here today as a assistant professor
of creative writing and have two books all thanks
to Tito and my experience at an MFA.
So it's an honor to welcome you back to Tucson, Tito.
[APPLAUSE]