Hi everybody, welcome.
How are you all?
Good, OK.
Can you hear me OK?
Great.
It sounds loud.
It's nice to have folks here, feels
really good to have people coming back to the Poetry
Center for poetry readings.
So thanks for doing this.
We of course had the break during the summer,
July happened to all of us.
But it's really nice to be here in August,
and to have poets back in this place.
And it's so exciting to have Angel Dominguez here,
who's been our summer poet in residence.
And their presence has been beautiful, and enlarging,
and lots of great conversations.
And we're so, so excited about Angel's presence
in this reading tonight.
So more to come.
I'm Tyler Meier.
I work here as the director at the Poetry Center.
I'm going to just tell you about a couple of things coming up,
really quickly, at the Poetry Center in the near term
with our calendar.
And hint that the fall calendar for the Poetry Center
in the fall season is imminent.
And so that calendar will be in the mail very, very soon.
If you're not on our mailing list and would like to be,
just on the other side of this wall
there's a place where you can leave contact information,
and we will put you on our mailing list.
We send beautiful and benign emails
that you can delete if you don't want.
And then there are things to post up on your fridge,
on your bulletin boards that tell you all the things that
are happening, so you can be in the loop
about readings that are coming up at the Poetry Center.
We are supporting something right now called
the Sealey Challenge.
Is anybody reading for the Sealey Challenge right now?
Some of you are, good.
Does anybody not know what the Sealey challenge is?
Some of you don't, OK.
I'll just very quickly say, it's a challenge
to read a book of poems every day for the month of August.
Which sounds like a lot, but you can do it.
If I can do it, you can do it.
And you're lucky that you live in a city that
has a giant poetry center, which is-- all the books are there.
So if you missed this earlier on in August
and are interested, and want to do it, you still have time.
You can jump right in.
And I promise it'll change your brain.
It's an amazing thing to put that much poetry
in one place over 31 days.
So come join us, it'll be a lot of fun.
There's some programs happening around that, that you can learn
about on the current calendar.
I won't mention those right now.
But that is also around the corner,
if you want to pick that up.
The last summer social, we have a series
of summer socials in the summer.
On August 23rd, there's an event at Hotel Congress,
in the Copper Room.
And that features the writer Gretchen Henderson.
And she'll be launching her new book which is called,
"Life in the Tar Seeps."
And it's a book about environmental catastrophe,
and also the resilience of creativity,
and thinking about the interactions between those two
things.
And Gretchen is a beautiful thinker,
and that'll be a lot of fun.
She'll be talking about that book and the work
that she does generally around those intersections.
There's a great new exhibit at the Poetry
Center called Big Books.
And it is indeed big books.
They're oversized editions and collections.
And that is up right now.
The Center is open during the summer, Tuesday through Friday,
9:00 to 5:00.
We'll soon switch back over to our Saturday hours
when school year starts, so at the end of the month.
And so come visit that exhibit, it's delightful,
they're monstrous and beautiful in all of their large
and largesse.
I want to say, we had a small miscommunication
with the bookstore.
And had the books that we had ordered for this reading
are not here tonight.
So it is coming upon you to go find Angel's books
and to buy them.
And Angel will be around, and so there
may be a chance to even to get them signed later.
But please help us support Angel's work.
And you're going to hear this and be
excited about these books immediately,
and so I encourage you to seek them out.
Make sure you're purchasing them and enjoying them.
And I think Angel's going to read
from existing work, but also some new things,
and talk a little bit about work that's upcoming.
I will stop there.
It's my pleasure to welcome up the introducer for tonight,
and that is a great friend of the Poetry Center, a colleague,
a great friend of mine Farid Matuk.
A wonderful poet here in Tucson, treasured colleague,
a translator and a poet, who teaches in the creative writing
program.
Please help me welcome Farid Matuk to come introduce Angel.