Hello, everybody.
How are you all?
Good.
It's a quiet Tuesday.
How is everybody?
You're here!
You're choosing poetry.
You're my kind of people.
Thanks for being here on a Tuesday.
And this is our last reading of the fall season.
So you're helping us with an exclamation point at the end
of a beautiful sentence.
And we're grateful for that and really
excited to have Charif Shanahan with us,
behind his beautiful new book and all of his poems.
And so we'll hear more from Charif, of course, shortly,
in an introduction coming.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the director at the Poetry Center.
My sole job tonight is to tell you just a few things.
One is those books that I mentioned that are beautiful,
they're all for sale.
And there are people you love who need presents,
and you should buy them this book.
And maybe that person is yourself.
So avail yourselves of those books afterwards.
I know Charif would be happy to sign them.
And I want to just tell you very--
well, I want to say this too.
There are people who make these readings happen
in semesterly ways here.
And that's the staff at the Poetry Center.
So it's such a team sport.
And we have such a beautiful team.
And there's a few representatives
of that group that are here.
And so Bruno makes everything sound good.
And so a round of applause for Bruno for all of his work.
[APPLAUSE]
And then I get to work every day with Paola Valenzuela.
And she's over here.
And she makes so many good things
happen at the Poetry Center.
And it's such a joy to work with these people
all the time in regular ways.
So give them a high five afterwards too
and tell them how great they are.
The other thing I want to mention is that, of course,
there's a spring season that's coming.
And so you maybe saw some of those events that
are happening coming up that were on the slideshow that
was just behind me.
But just to give you a taste of what's coming up in January,
we'll come back on January 11.
There's a reading-- the 25th anniversary
reading from the magazine Terrain.org.
And that's going to feature the poets Allison Adelle Hedge
Coke, Derek Sheffield, and Julie Swarstad Johnson
from the Poetry Center, which we're really excited about.
On the 18th of January, we have a reading with the poet Edgar
Kunz.
And then on the 25th, we have the poet Brenda Hillman
coming back to Tucson.
And on the 27th, on a Saturday for a matinee reading,
we have the poet Robert Hass.
So we're really excited about that.
There'll be more coming in the rest of the season.
The calendar will be announced in the coming weeks.
So we want to make sure everybody knows about those.
Start to imagine those events here at the Poetry Center
and come join us.
I also want to mention many of these-- the readers who
are coming in the spring are also teaching courses.
And so we're in a window right now where
we have our financial aid window for the classes in the spring.
So we want to make these classes available without a barrier
to anybody who wants to take them.
If you could use support to take one of the classes,
this is a great time to apply.
It's very easy to apply.
You just check a box that says, I need this,
and then you're in.
And then we are able to give away four tuitions
to the class of your choice.
So we'll pull four names out of everyone who submits interest,
and we're really excited to support that
and to bring people into those classes for the spring.
General registration for those classes opens up on the 12th.
So if you're interested in any of those courses,
that would be the time for signing up.
And some of them always go quick.
So sign up if you're interested.
And scholarship, those financial aid windows open right now.
Those are my updates.
It's my pleasure to welcome up a great friend of the Poetry
Center, a professor in creative writing here
at the University of Arizona, the author of the poetry
book The Real Horse and This Isa Nice Neighborhood,
and the artist's book Redolent, and a new book of translations
that's coming out in the next year
that we're very excited about, my colleague and friend Farid
Matuk.