Hey, everybody.
Welcome.
How are you all?
Good.
Come in.
If you're arriving, there's more seats,
there's some seats inside and more seats in the back
too if you want to grab extra chairs that are in the back.
But glad to have a good crowd on a Thursday night in Tucson,
thanks for being here.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the director at the Poetry Center.
Lovely to have a big crowd here for Saretta Morgan who we're
thrilled to welcome back to Tucson,
and to read from her newest work and from this wonderful book,
Alt-Nature.
And I wanted to just quickly give you guys
a couple of updates on some things
that are happening next at the Poetry Center
so everybody has some context.
First thing to say is that there's
a second event that's connected to this one tonight that's
happening tomorrow night.
And that's going to be at 6 o'clock
at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Tucson, so
MOCA Tucson.
Free event, 6 o'clock.
And it will be a section of this book that will
bring in four other voices--
four voices to perform a polyphonic way,
that section of the book, so a performative aspect of it.
And the four voices that you'll hear; Amber Morningstar
Byars will be here to read, Raquel Gutiérrez will be here
to read, Sasha Hawkins, and Coco Montellano.
It's going to be great.
So choose to come again tomorrow night 6 o'clock MOCA Tucson
for the next part of what you'll hear tonight.
And we hope you guys will come and join us.
Next at the Center on April 4th, so back here on a Thursday night
next week, will be a reading called "The Place
where Clouds are Formed."
And it's a reading that's connected to an exhibit that's
launching at the Poetry Center that will be installed
relatively soon, but the official launch date
is the fourth as well.
So you can come a little bit early and enjoy the exhibit,
and then come back for the reading
or stay for the reading that'll be at 7 o'clock.
So the center will be open the whole time up until the reading
starts and a little bit after the reading
as well to enjoy that exhibit.
And that's going to feature the poets Ofelia Zepeda,
Amber Lee Ortega, and Su:k Chu:vak Fulwider,
and we're really excited about that.
That's a collaborative exhibit that's happening over our space
here at the Poetry Center and also at the Center
for Creative Photography.
And it will be up throughout the rest of the spring,
and it's a beautiful exhibit that
tells this particular story about experiences
of the borderlands.
It's perhaps very different from what we sometimes
get in the national media.
And we're really pleased with that and excited about it.
So come back and check that out and join us.
April 11th.
If you've been following along in our calendar,
we were to have a visit from the Mexican novelist Brenda Lozano.
And that has unfortunately needed to be postponed,
and so-- and it's for a good reason.
Brenda has a chance through her publisher
to go do a tour of Spain as part of the work that's
happening with that book.
We're going to postpone that event that would happen here
until August 29.
So Brenda is still coming just slightly later.
And if you were planning to come to that,
we hope to see you come back in August when she'll be here.
And then the last thing to say is
something that's very, very new and we'll soon
have on our website.
And some of you-- how many of you
know about the mural project happening on Speedway Boulevard?
Some of you do.
OK, good.
If you don't know about it, I'm excited to just give you
a quick context for it.
There are six new murals on the Speedway corridor through campus
that are all done by six different muralists
through the Alley Cat Muralist Collective.
And they feature the work taking their inspiration
from the poetry of six different poets.
And so those murals are now completed.
They're all on Speedway and we're
going to have an event on April 23 to launch those murals.
That's going to be at 5 o'clock here at the Poetry Center.
And this event will be on our website soon.
And we're going to meet here, we'll
hear a little bit about the project
here from some of the participants.
There will be ice cream and vegan options.
And then it will be a self-paced walking or rolling
experience of going to see the art in different spaces
on Speedway, just outside and we'll
circle back to the Poetry Center at the end.
They're really beautiful.
And so if you're driving along Speedway
and you see beautiful things to the left
or to the right, that's probably what's happening,
are these great murals based on poets and poems.
It's my pleasure to welcome a great friend of the Poetry
Center, Marianna ColesCurtis, who's going
to introduce Saretta Morgan.
Marianna is a volunteer here at the Poetry Center and works
in our Free Time program and has collaborated with us
in different ways.
A great friend and a great gift that they're here to help
introduce tonight Saretta.
They're a poet and an activist.
Their work can be found in Yes Poetry, Hunger Mountain, Sundog
Lit, and in other places.
Please help me welcome Marianna ColesCurtis.
[APPLAUSE]