Hello, everybody.
Welcome.
How are you all?
Good work.
Happy Thursday!
We did it.
We're almost out of February.
There's just a little bit more to go.
And that's what I want to tell you about, especially.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the Director at the Poetry Center.
It's a thrill to have a crowd here on a Thursday night.
As always, we're grateful to you for choosing poetry
and bringing that into your lives.
I want to tell you about a couple of upcoming events
at the Poetry Center just so you're aware of them.
Next Thursday, on the 29th--
so there is a 29th this year--
we have a reading from the poet, Matthew Zapruder, who's
coming to read, whose nonfiction book
is up for the National Book Critics Circle Award right now.
So we're really excited about that visit.
You can come.
It's a free reading.
It's back here, same space.
Thursday night, 7 o'clock at the Poetry Center.
And then after that, we have a visit from our fall poet
in residence, who is John Murillo.
We're really excited to have John here.
He'll be reading on March 14th.
And that's, again, back here at the Poetry Center, 7 o'clock,
free reading.
And we hope you'll come and visit and be with us for that.
If you're interested in John's work
and maybe don't know it as well as you might like to
or beginning to find it, this Saturday on the 24th,
there's a conversation about his work
that our docents are going to lead here at the Poetry Center
at 1 o'clock.
It's drop-in style book club, except the best
part is, you don't have to have read it in advance.
You just come.
There'll be a packet of poems that will be discussed.
And they'll be talking about and thinking
about John's work and some of his interests
and some of his influences.
So that's 1 o'clock here, this Saturday at the Poetry Center.
Please join us.
We are thrilled tonight to be celebrating a lot of things,
including the 20th anniversary of Letras Latinas.
And so, this is a national program,
if you're not familiar with it, that
has done tremendous work advocating for presenting,
archiving, working in partnership
with other organizations, and bringing forward
a sort of the wide expanse of Latinx letters in this country,
and in doing so, has widened the aperture for how
people expect what that might be, how Latinx letter shows up.
And so, they've brought an incredible array
of energy, new resources, archival practices,
programmatic partnerships, and especially, visibility in a way
that has been a tremendous intervention in the status quo.
Letras Latinas was founded at the University of Notre Dame.
And the energizing force for Letras Latinas for the past two
decades has been Francisco Aragón, a poet
and administrator and a friend.
Francisco is not here tonight, but I know
that he's on the live stream.
And it would mean a great deal to me
if we could just do a big round of applause
for Francisco's work, which we celebrate
and which we're grateful to be in partnership
with in a lot of different ways at the Poetry Center.
There's also some birthdays that have happened recently.
So Sheila turned 21 on the plane here.
No, sorry, not 21.
But you can imagine.
It was the 21st of February.
She turned 21.
So we're excited about that.
And it's Alexis' birthday tonight, so
lots of birthdays that we can celebrate, including this one.
And I was-- and I grew a little bit older, too.
It's happening.
You're surrounded by Pisces whether you like it or not.
It's a lot.
We embrace you.
Let's go swimming.
It's my pleasure to welcome up Letras Latinas' associate,
Laura Villareal, a great friend and colleague
at the Poetry Center.
We've been connected in a few different ways
over the last many years, and we're grateful for that.
And Laura is going to come up and introduce our readers
and talk a little bit more about Letras Latinas.
Laura is the author of the book a Girl's
Guide to Learning, which won the Robert A.--
I'm sorry, the John A. Robert Johnson
Award from the University of Wisconsin Press.
Tremendous book.
Please help me welcome Laura Villareal.
Thank you.