[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
Hey, everybody.
How are you doing?
Good.
Happy Thursday.
I stayed up all night making that video, so maybe
more applause.
It was a really good video.
[APPLAUSE]
That's the promo video for Tucson Humanities Festival,
which we're in the middle of, and we're
excited that this event is part of that
as well, doubling up with the Poetry Center's Reading Series.
I did not make that video.
My name is Tyler.
I work at the Poetry Center.
I mostly write emails.
But my colleagues did and the marketing and Alumni Relations
staff at the college, and they do
a lot of work for the Humanities Festival.
And Amanda Hunt is here, and a lot of her team members
are here, Eric Swedlund and others.
So round of applause for them for all their work--
Bruno-- and putting together these events,
which we're grateful for.
We also have some deans in the house.
So I want to say a quick hello and thank you for coming.
To Dean Durand, who's here as the Dean
of the College of Humanities.
Dean McAllister and Dean Warner, thank
you guys for coming and being here with us.
A round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
So every year on October, the College of Humanities
celebrates National Arts and Humanities Month
with the Tucson Humanities Festival, which began
in 2019 as a Humanities Week.
And it's grown into the festival work that happens now.
The theme this year is well-being,
as you saw in the little video.
And this highlights the crucial ways in which the Humanities
and Health Sciences can collaborate,
can overlap, and can find generative possibilities.
And we're so excited to think about this
and think about this in the context of Brandon Som's
work, who's traveled to be with us here today
and come back to Tucson on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize
winning book, Tripas.
And we're so excited about that.
[APPLAUSE]
And thinking about that book and that work also
as an act of wellness or an exploration of it,
of being in right relationship with the histories that add up
into our existences, or how language or languages can
be a site of possibility, not of lack or absence or difference,
but instead something more about doubling the world
or tripling the world's possibilities.
And I think Brandon's book does that
and all of his work in the most beautiful of ways.
And so I'm really excited about this event and this reading
tonight.
Lots of sponsors to thank for the Humanities Festival.
So especially the Arizona Humanities, which helps
support and make this possible.
Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, the Arizona Theater Company,
the University of Arizona Health Sciences,
and then especially thanks tonight
for collaboration and support from the Center
for East Asian Studies, which is co-sponsoring Brandon's visit
to Tucson.
So we'll applaud, everybody.
[APPLAUSE]
We managed to turn off the heat a little bit
for Brandon's visit, which is also a delight.
So enjoy the fact that you may have
to roll a sleeve down or two during the reading.
And please be comfortable while you're here.
I'll just mention a couple other things
that are going to happen very quickly before we welcome up
an introduction for Brandon.
Tomorrow, the university is hosting the fall iteration
of their TEDx series, and there are
two presentations that are connected to the Poetry Center.
So I want to make sure you know about them.
One is my terrific colleague, our library director
here at the Poetry Center, Sarah Kortemeier,
will be speaking at that presentation about the work
to caption our Voca archive, which is literally
putting the language that's connected
to 6 million words of poetry that have been spoken
and Poetry Center spaces over the last 64 years.
That project was a project of the whole library staff.
And it is complete now, historically.
So now the work is about captioning going forward.
And we're so thrilled to be in this moment
with that, this moment for the archive for what
it means, knowing all of the words that are in that space.
So if you're interested in learning more about that,
Sarah will be speaking about that at the TEDx Talk tomorrow.
It's from 2:00 to 5:00 at Centennial Hall.
I don't think you have to stay the whole time.
And you can learn more about that.
The tickets are $5 by just looking up TEDx Tucson.
The other speaker will be--
that's connected to the Poetry Center is the artist
Jodie Chertudi, who's one of the muralists in the Speedway Mural
Project, in the corridor of Speedway, that
happened over the summer.
And she'll be talking about her work,
taking a poem from the local poet, Logan Phillips,
and imagining that into a 75-foot long wall.
And how she did that, how text becomes visual.
So I hope you'll join us for those.
Two readings coming up at the Poetry Center.
We'll be back here next week with the poet
Tilsa Otta and her translator Farid Matuk, who's
a faculty member here at the U of A. Tilsa is a Peruvian poet.
This will be a bilingual reading in Spanish and English.
We're really excited about this.
And it's a collaboration with Graywolf Press,
who's celebrating their 50th anniversary this year.
So hope to see you back here next week,
7 o'clock on Thursday at the Poetry Center.
And then beyond that, on November 7,
we have a visit from Griffin Poetry Prize winner
and Kingsley Tufts Award winner, Roger Reeves,
who'll be here in Tucson on November 7.
Both of those at 7 o'clock free here at the Poetry Center.
It is my pleasure now, or I should say one other thing.
We'll forego a Q&A after the reading,
but Brandon's excited to sign books.
And there are books for sale over on my right,
so hope you will come and avail yourselves of those books
and then come up and meet Brandon afterwards and connect
with him a little bit.
It is a great pleasure for me to introduce the person who
will tell you a little bit more about Brandon,
and that is my colleague and friend and collaborator,
Jacqueline Barrios.
Barrios is a faculty member in the Applied and Public
Humanities Department here at the University of Arizona.
And among her many interests, which are awesome--
and I encourage you to learn more about her and her work--
are the pursuits are the Lit Lab project.
This is a hub site that fuses site specific research
with the interpretation of literary texts
in order to document, animate, and uplift
the life worlds of communities who read them.
It's incredible.
And there's a book that she's working
on that's coming out of that project that
will be coming from the University of Iowa Press.
So please help me welcome my colleague,
Dr. Jacqueline Barrios.
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