Hello, everybody.
Welcome.
How are you all?
Applause, great.
[APPLAUSE]
Can you hear me in the back?
You can.
Beautiful thumbs.
Nice to see them.
Thanks for braving clouds in Tucson.
Sometimes, that's a thing and you're brave to be here.
You've made a great choice with your Thursday night,
and I want to commend you on it.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the Director at the Poetry Center.
And lovely to have a big group here
to welcome Marilyn Chin to Tucson, back to Tucson.
We were realizing that it has been--
it's been 27 years.
And so it's a delight to have Marilyn back in Tucson
to read at the Poetry Center--
[APPLAUSE]
--from her very terrific new book.
And so one of the things I want to say
is that books are for sale after the reading including
the newest one, Sage.
And those are over at the book sale table,
and they're happy to vend those books to you.
If you've got extra money, that's a great place to put it.
It's the holiday season, people you
love need to read more poems.
This is one way to take care of two things at once
and support poets at the same time.
I want to point out just a couple of things that are
coming up at the Poetry Center.
We have one last reading this fall,
and that's on December 5th.
And the thing to know about that is
that December 5th is a Tuesday and not a Thursday.
So our next reading and our last reading
is on a Tuesday night, 7 o'clock,
back here at the Poetry Center.
It's a terrific poet named Charif Shanahan, who
will be here behind his most recent book,
Trace Evidence, which was longlisted for the National
Book Award this year.
So we're really excited that Charif is coming to Tucson.
So come back for that.
Charif is also teaching a class at the Poetry Center,
and that class still has a couple spots left.
So if you're interested in taking a class--
some of you might have taken Marilyn's class
that was here last night.
Charif is teaching as well.
And the class's title is Locating the Self:
Intertextual Poetic Strategies.
And it's about relationships between poets and precursors.
So a poet that maybe comes before
and then a contemporary poet that arises from that work--
and thinking about your own work in relationship.
So all of those details you can find out more about
in the handy dandy calendar, which
is good for about three or four more weeks.
And then there will be a new one to replace it
with a lot of really exciting things coming up this spring.
And we're really pleased for that season,
and we'll be telling you more about that in the weeks
to come.
It's a great pleasure for me to welcome up
a colleague and a friend who will introduce Marilyn.
And that is the poet, and professor, and essayist Susan
Briante.
As a Professor of creative writing
in the English department here at the U of A,
Susan is also the faculty liaison.
And has done a lot of work building up the UA's Field
Studies program, which sends graduate students
into the field to do creative work and then report back.
It's a tremendous program.
Her most recent book is an essay collection,
a nonfiction title called Defacing the Monument,
and it's from Noemi Press.
Please help welcome my friend Susan Briante.
[APPLAUSE]