Hey, everybody.
How are you all?
[CHEERING]
All right!
Thursday, people standing.
Come find seats.
There's lots in front up here, and there's more in the back.
Glad everybody's here.
You're making good choices on a Thursday.
How many of you are about to finish school for the year?
Congrats to you.
[APPLAUSE]
Good work with the excitement.
We're really thrilled about this reading
and excited to have a crowd here.
This is a 4 by 4 MFA reading.
So four readers from the University of Arizona MFA
program who have graduated from that program,
have gone on to do other things.
All have new books.
We'll hear more about all of that very, very soon.
We're thrilled that this is happening
and thrilled that, welcome these writers back to the Poetry
Center to do a reading tonight.
My name is Tyler.
I work here as the director at the Poetry Center.
I'll just say a couple of quick updates,
and then we'll jump right into this reading
and hear from these folks.
There's one more reading in our list for the season.
So it's been a beautiful spring season
with a ton of really amazing readings.
There's one more to come.
That's on the 11th of May.
So it's a Saturday.
It happens at noon, and it's for the participants in our classes
and workshops program.
So people who have taken classes at the Poetry Center all
have a chance to read.
And that will happen here at the Poetry Center on the 11th
at noon.
And we're welcome to come back to that.
We'd love to see you.
Sooner than that, on Saturday the 4th, as in two days away,
at 9 o'clock there is a docent organized tour of the haikus
that are posted in Downtown Tucson.
So you might know about this contest
that the Downtown Tucson partnership runs,
where they ask for haiku on a particular theme related
to the desert or to Tucson.
And so there were 20 winners this year out of 2000 haiku.
They placed them all into planters in Downtown Tucson
throughout the spring season.
So there'll be a walk or if you like,
a hike, a haiku hike, as they call it.
Of those, it's about a mile.
It should be really beautiful.
9:00 AM on Saturday, there's going to be that walk,
led by our docents.
If you're interested in doing that,
you can meet in the lobby of Hotel Congress at 9:00,
and then they'll depart from there.
So it should be a lot of fun, a chance
to be in beautiful downtown before it gets too, too hot.
Come join us for that.
So that's the fourth.
There's the reading on the 11th.
Next up, and I'm excited to tell you all about this.
This is an event that's been added.
It's our first summer social of the season.
So on Wednesday the 15th of May, we'll be moving to the Century
Room at Hotel Congress.
And there'll be a book launch for the writer
Karen Brennan, who has a new book of stories coming out
called Rabbit in the Moon, published by Schaffner Press,
a publisher here in Tucson.
That will be at 5 o'clock on Wednesday the 15th,
and again in the Century Room.
It's a free reading.
There'll be free snacks, which you can avail ourselves of.
And then the bar will be doing what
the bar does, if you're interested in those things
as well.
So those are all coming up.
You can learn about all of those on the Poetry Center website,
poetry.arizona.edu.
There are some books for sale.
So some of the books are for sale over here on my right.
Some of them are for sale right here on my other right.
And then around the corner outside,
I also just want to mention there are some free books.
So the books for sale are from the readers tonight.
Please come and spend your money on those.
They're all beautiful books.
These are, I think, first books for each of the writers tonight,
and we're really excited to support them.
Let's buy them all up and send them home with empty boxes.
The free books that are around the corner
are gifts from the Lannan Foundation, which
is a organization that supported literature
for a long, long time.
And they're winding down their work as a foundation.
These are two chapbooks that they had many extras of,
and so they sent some here to share with audiences in Tucson.
One is a chapbook of the poet Mahmoud Darwish,
and one is a chapbook of the poet Adrienne Rich.
And so those are right around the corner in the breezeway.
We hope you'll take some of those home with you
as well after you buy the other books that you're here,
in that order.
And then the last thing I just want to say really quickly
is that we'll shift to our summer hours
here at the Poetry Center as the semester ends.
So we'll be closed on Saturdays.
We'll be open from Tuesday through Friday from 9:00
to 5:00, and that begins on the 11th.
So the 11th of May, it's the first day that we're closed.
And we'll be closed on Saturdays throughout the summer
until the end of August, when the school
year starts back up again.
Hope you'll come visit us and enjoy the great
air conditioning and the many, many poetry books
as you're able.
It's a great pleasure to welcome up a friend and a colleague who
will do the introductions tonight
for the readers, the professor Ander Monson.
Please give him a warm welcome.
And he's got a lot in store for us.
[APPLAUSE]