WEBVTT

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I'm very pleased to be able
to introduce to you tonight

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Luis Alberto Urrea.

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In particular, I am
pleased to welcome him

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because we've made him work very
hard and he's still on his feet,

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and we're absolutely delighted.

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He spent some time at Rincon
University High this morning.

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I think some students
are here from that event.

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And that was, I think,
an important connection

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that we were happy
to make between some

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of the literary resources that
meet the University and younger

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readers and students of poetry.

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Luis Urrea was born
in Tijuana, Mexico

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to an American mother
and a Mexican father.

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One can say that the border
crosses in his own body.

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In fact, central to his
life and his artistic work.

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He graduated from the University
of California, San Diego.

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Has done relief work
on the Mexican border.

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And later, taught expository
writing at Harvard.

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He's the author of a book of
poems, The Fever of Being,

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which won the Western
States Book Award, a novel,

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In Search of Snow,
two non-fiction books,

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Across The Wire: Life and Hard
Times on The Mexican Border,

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which won a 1994
Christopher Award

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and was a New York Times
notable book of the year,

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and just out, By The Lake
of Sleeping Children:

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The Secret Life of
the Mexican Border.

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A writer who never seems
to stand still, he also

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has a new poetry book coming
out called Ghost Sickness

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that will be published by
Cinco Punto Press in El Paso.

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And he's just finished
a new nonfiction

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book set in the Rocky Mountains,
titled Wandering Time Western

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Notebooks.

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Common to all of his books are
a poet's attention to language

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and an intensity of focus.

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The influences on
his poetry range

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from Sting to Steve McQueen,
Sherman Alexie, José Emilio

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Pacheco, and A.R. Ammons.

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Whether he is fictionally
portraying the absurdities

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of masculinity or documenting
with impeccable clarity

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the strained lives of
garbage pickers and relief

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workers along the
border or exploring

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the music of his imagination
in his pleasingly strange and

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expansive poems,
this is a writer

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devoted to the possibilities
that language can open.

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Please welcome Luis Urrea.

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[APPLAUSE]

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