Hi, everyone.
I'm Diana Delgado.
I'm 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.
Today, I'm excited to host Vanessa Angélica Villarreal,
Frank Johnson, and Raquel Salas Rivera as part of Art
for Justice, a three-year project that commissioned
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.
Before we begin, the University of Arizona Poetry Center
must acknowledge that we exist on the traditional homelands
of the Tohono O'odham, who have cared
for these lands for centuries.
As a guest in these lands, I want
to acknowledge that we are on occupied Tohono O'odham
territory.
And in our program tonight, each poet will read new work,
and after the reading, we'll be in conversation.
Thank you everyone for being with us here today.
As our first reader, I'd like to introduce Frank Johnson.
Frank Johnson is a Black poet, cultural critic,
and visual artist from East Las Vegas.
He received his MFA in 2019 from the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, where his manuscript Literal
Dope won the University prize for Outstanding Master's
Thesis.
Frank's work has been featured in the Believer, Gen Magazine,
Level Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books,
The Shallow End, The Rumpus, and Desert Companion.
He has previously been awarded the Black Mountain Institute
Donald Barlow Fellowship, has worked
as an editorial assistant for the Believer,
and currently works in collaboration
with Jack Jones Literary Arts as a book publicist and programs
assistant.
Thank you, Frank, for being with us here today.