Our next reading will be one week from tonight with visiting
poet James Merrill.
And that will be our last visitor for this year.
Mr. Merrill will be meeting students
informally at the Poetry Center at 3:30 on Tuesday afternoon.
And everyone is invited who would like
to come and ask him questions.
If you don't know where the Poetry Center is,
it's the corner of Speedway and Highland, 1086 North Highland.
On the schedule that we distributed
at the beginning of the semester,
we listed student readings for April 8th and April 15th.
The April 8th reading has been canceled.
So we have two readings to go--
Mr. Merrill next week and the final student reading on April
15th.
Writers at Work has a reading next week also.
On Thursday night, Robert Houston
of the Creative Writing faculty and Susan Roberts,
an MFA student at the University,
will be reading from their fiction.
And that will be at 8 o'clock in the junior ballroom.
I hope you can stay after the reading tonight.
We have some punch and cookies.
And tell Byrd how wonderful she is.
Byrd Baylor's novel, Yes Is Better Than No,
was published by Scribner's in 1977.
She's published 25 books, which she describes as,
more or less, for children.
Many of you know that they're more or less for adults too.
Some of the titles are Moon Song,
I'm in Charge of Celebrations, If You Are a Hunter of Fossils,
The Desert Is Theirs, and The Way to Start a Day.
Some of her honors and awards are 1985 Outstanding Arizona
Author, Arizona Library Association Award,
the Catlin Peace Pipe Award from the American Indian Lore
Association, three Texas Institute of Letters Awards,
four Border Regional Library Association
Awards, six American Library Association Notable Book
Awards, and four Outstanding Science Trade Book Awards,
and the New York Academy of Sciences Children's Science
Award.
She lives in Tucson and in Arivaca.
I'd like to read one quote from Elliott Arnold in speaking
of Yes Is Better Than No because he
says what I feel much better than I could say it.
"This is a dream of a book.
It transports you to a world you have never seen
and to people you have never known.
And when you finish and put it down,
you will sigh and wish you could have visited a little longer.
Don't let this one get by."
Byrd Baylor.
[APPLAUSE]