Hello, everybody.
How are you doing.
Good.
Great.
It's nice to hear a response.
You're all doing well.
Everybody's good?
Yeah.
OK, good.
Glad you're here.
Thanks for coming.
Welcome to the Poetry Center.
We're really pleased to have this reading tonight with Andrew
Grace and Susan Nguyen.
It's a great gift to have these poets here with us in Tucson.
Returning to Tucson, both of them.
And so we're pleased to have them back in the city and back
at the Poetry Center.
This reading happens every year at the Poetry Center.
We call this our annual Morgan Lucas Schuldt Memorial Reading.
Did anybody here know Morgan?
Some of you did.
Yes.
Good.
OK.
An incredible poet, an incredible voice
who passed away some time ago.
And this reading was started with a private donation
to help support emerging and innovative poets
and to bring those voices into the Poetry Center's reading
series every year.
And I wanted to just tell you a little bit about Morgan,
so you might know a bit more about him.
He's the author of two books of poems, Verge and erros,
and those are both from a press called Parlor Press.
And both of those are at the Poetry Center
if you might like to see them or learn more about Morgan's work,
as well as his three chapbooks.
And those include Otherhow, a book called L=u=N=G=U=A=G=E,
and a book that's titled As Vanish, Especially, excuse me,
As Vanish, Unespecially.
You maybe picking up a theme and some of Morgan's interest
in his work, which was about playfulness
with language, exploring the possibilities of language,
what holds it together, where it threatens to break apart.
What happens when you put two unlike things together,
create new words out of that.
And those interests of playfulness, I think,
guided a lot of his aesthetic, and his work
led to a lot of his interest in the other poets
that he tracked and followed that, again,
fed back into the work that he was creating.
So we do this every year in memory of Morgan
and celebrating his work.
And again, it's a real pleasure to have these two poets here
with us tonight, Andy and Susan, to help honor that legacy even
further.
I want to tell you and pivot now to about some
upcoming things that are happening at the Poetry Center,
or in Tucson more broadly.
We've had a really great spring season
at the Poetry Center so far.
How many of you have been to other readings here this spring?
Very good.
I'm giving you all a high five.
There's more coming up and I want to tell you
about them really quickly.
But we shift for a bit in March.
And so the next big happening at the Poetry Center is on March 7.
We'll have the state finals for the Poetry Out Loud program.
So that's Saturday back here at the Poetry Center.
That's 1 o'clock.
Poetry Out Loud is a program where
high school students memorize poems and then recite them.
And so this brings the best in the state of Arizona
to do that work at the Poetry Center.
It's pretty amazing to see high school students reciting poems
out loud for you.
And so if you're interested in having that awesome experience,
that's back here March 7, 1 o'clock at the Poetry Center.
Soon after that, there's something called the Tucson
Festival of Books, which has many things happening,
and I encourage you to get on their website
to see the breadth and depth of all of it.
Lots of good poetry things happening.
But what I want to particularly plug
is the last session on Sunday 4 o'clock,
where the poetry events mostly happen,
which is in the Kiva Room.
We'll have the first reading from Tucson's new poet laureate,
which has not yet been named, but will
be next week with an announcement from the mayor.
We'll also have a first Tucson reading
since she has been named as our new state poet laureate
by our governor, Katie Hobbs.
And our new Arizona poet laureate is the poet Laura Tohe.
And so Laura will be here to read,
as well as the new Tucson poet laureate.
That's 4 o'clock in the Kiva in the Student Union.
I hope you can join us and be a part of that happenings,
amongst many other things happening
with lots of excitement at the book festival.
There's a new exhibit opening at the Poetry Center,
and that's Indigenous Poets from the Rare Book Room.
It's a beautiful exhibit.
It opens officially on Tuesday, but it is up now.
So if you want to come check that out as early as tomorrow,
I would be happy for you to see that.
And that will be in place throughout the spring season
and into the early summer.
It's a beautiful exhibit of a lot of really incredible work,
and we hope you'll spend some time with that if you're
at the Poetry Center and want to check it out.
We will do readings again.
And the next one that's coming up
is with the poet Zeina Hashem Beck,
who will be here as our spring poet
and residence in collaboration with the Center for Middle
Eastern Studies.
And that happens on Thursday, March 26,
back in this space at 7 o'clock.
And then immediately following that,
we have a retreat that's coming from the Indigenous Nations
Poets, which will host about 30 emerging Native poets
in Southern Arizona.
And there will be events happening, including
one that we're just getting up on the website
with the poet Natalie Diaz and the writer Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson.
And that's going to be at Amerind on the Wednesday,
April 1.
And then two readings from the retreat
that will be here on April 2 and April 3.
So there's a lot coming up and things you can learn about
on our website.
And I hope you'll take advantage of this
and come participate in all of them.
We're going to have books for sale after the reading.
We'll skip the normal kind of Q and A that sometimes happens,
but I know both writers would be happy to talk to you.
And those books are for sale on my right
at the table with the bookstore.
Come buy some books and come meet these poets
after the poetry reading.
My colleague Aria Pahari is going
to introduce Susan, who will read second.
And I'll just give you some quick context
for Aria, who will come up after Andy's done reading.
Aria is a poet and an editor who works here at the Poetry Center.
So delightfully if you come, you get to hang out with Aria.
You can find her work in places like The Georgia
Review, Waxwing, Inverted Syntax and Margins, among other places.
She's the library specialist here at the Poetry Center,
works with our library collections
and materials and outreach.
She's the only person with special
in her title at the Poetry Center.
And that's not a mistake.
That's legit.
And she's the one.
So she'll come up and introduce Susan
once Andy's done reading and--