Good evening.
Thank you all so much for being here.
It's always a thrill to see such an audience turn out
for poetry in Tucson and especially
to turn up for our three poets tonight
and celebrating this new exhibit, The Place
Where Clouds Are Formed.
My name is Julie Swarstad Johnson,
and I'm the archivist and outreach librarian here
and I'm grateful to welcome you.
It's a privilege to present this exhibit in collaboration
with the Center for Creative Photography.
And we're honored to celebrate the exhibit's opening tonight
with this reading by Su:k Chu:vak Fulwilder,
Amber Lee Ortega, and Ofelia Zepeda.
Quickly, before I introduce the project and our readers,
just a couple events coming up this month to tell you about.
Brenda Lozano was set to read on April 11, which
was a week from tonight.
That's been postponed to August 29.
So you get a week off but come back in August.
The Tucson Poetry Festival is next weekend, August 13 and 14.
There's a free reading on Saturday the 13th,
7 PM at the Temple of Music and Art with Victoria Chang,
Rae Gouirand, Gabriel Dozal, who's here tonight,
and Wyatt Welch.
And you can find more information
at tucsonpoetryfest.org.
In two weeks, we will have a reading on April 18.
You can come at 7 PM to hear Mexican poet Natalia
Toledo and her translator Clare Sullivan.
On Saturday April 20, our very fun Kids Create event returns.
So if you have kids 10 or younger in your life,
bring them here from 10 AM to 1 PM for poetry events.
On Tuesday, April 23 at 5 PM, please
join us to celebrate the completion
of six murals along Speedway.
I don't know if you've noticed that there are new murals going
in but they're poetry themed.
So to celebrate that at 5 PM on that Tuesday,
we will be having an ice cream social.
Wow, I'm excited.
[CHUCKLES] And then also, there will be a self-paced walking
or rolling tour of the murals.
Details are online.
Related to this exhibit, you're invited to continue celebrating
The Place Where Clouds Are Formed this Saturday,
so two days from now, April 6 at the Center for Creative
Photography, we'll have an artist panel from 10:00 to 11:30
PM in the CCP.
And you'll hear from our three readers tonight plus artist
Monica Martínez-Díaz.
Following the panel, there'll be a community celebration
on the patio outside of the CCP with live music
by DJ MizSkoden, a poetry station with Logan Phillips,
who's also here somewhere, and an art-making station with David
Contreras.
The CCP portion of the exhibit officially
opens that day, Saturday.
So it's the perfect time to go check it out.
And it's absolutely beautiful in that space.
Finally, if you didn't get to see the exhibit here,
which is over in the library--
it's in the lobby and then back behind the stacks--
we are going to reopen the building
after the reading tonight just for about half an hour.
So you're welcome, if you didn't see it, to go across the way
and check it out.
You also can come back any time that we're open,
so we hope you'll spend time with this beautiful exhibit.
So as we begin tonight with all of those announcements over,
we respectfully acknowledge that the University of Arizona,
including the Poetry Center and the Center for Creative
Photography, is on the land and territories of Indigenous
peoples.
Today Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes
with Tucson being home to the O'odham and the Yaqui.
Committed to diversity and inclusion,
the university strives to build sustainable relationships
with sovereign native nations and Indigenous communities
through education offerings, partnerships,
and community service.
The Place Where Clouds Are Formed is a dynamic collective
of artists working in photography, poetry,
paper sculpture, and photography-based installation
among just a few--
there even more than that.
Their work considers spirituality, migration,
and the policies that have disrupted the traditional lands
of the Tohono O'odham.
The project aims to reorient the narrative away
from geopolitical concerns and towards the genealogical stories
and religious and cultural traditions of the people
who live and migrate here.
The project began in 2018 as a collaboration
between Tohono O'odham poet and Regents Professor Ofelia
Zepeda, photographer Gareth Smit, who's also here tonight,
and writer, translator, and researcher Martín Zícari who's
also here tonight.
From their initial pairing of Dr. Zepeda's poem
with Smit's documentary photography,
this project keeps expanding to include new voices across four
prior exhibitions.
So this is the fifth installation of this,
and it keeps changing every time.
In this fifth iteration of the project,
we're grateful to present work by the founding trio plus Amber
Lee Ortega, Su:k Chu:vak Fulwider, Monica Martínez-Díaz,
and Terrol Dew Johnson in collaboration with Chris Lasch
and Alice Wilsey.
There's so many people to thank for this exhibit but the first
that I want to say is thank you to the artists.
We're truly honored to be able to show your work in this space.
Thank you, Gareth, Martín, and Ofelia, for all of the work
that you've done over many years to coordinate this.
And special thanks go to my co-curators
for this exhibit, Denisse Brito from the Center for Creative
Photography.
She's the learning and engagement manager
and is right in front of me.
And then also, Jenna S. Green from the CCP.
She's a graduate assistant and she's somewhere in the audience
as well.
The Place Where Clouds Are Formed
wishes to thank the University of Arizona Confluence Center
Fronteridades Project, which is made possible through a grant
from the Mellon Foundation.
Thank you, finally, to the Poetry Center staff
and especially Paola Valenzuela, who's somewhere,
and Tyler Meier for your support of this reading.
So here's the format for tonight.
I'll briefly introduce each poet just before they come up
and we'll have-- they'll go in this order.
So we'll hear first from Ofelia Zepeda,
second from Su:k Chu:vak Fulwilder and then last from
Amber Lee Ortega.