Hello, everybody.
How are you doing?
Good.
Good, great.
Yay.
Good.
Yay, yay.
Good, I'm glad.
I want to know that you're doing well.
And I hope that everyone is doing well.
And I think you're making a choice tonight
that points towards wellness, and that you've
come to a poetry reading on a Thursday night in Tucson.
And so I commend you for excellent choices.
And I hope that you'll consider coming
back again for more and more.
And I'll tell you more about some things
that are coming up at the Poetry Center in a second.
My name is Tyler, and I work here
as the director at the Poetry Center.
Anyone, is this your first time to the Poetry Center?
Good work.
Yeah, great.
This is me giving you all a high five.
I hope you feel welcome.
I hope you'll think of this as a place
that you can keep returning to.
There's an amazing spring with a lot of things coming up.
And we hope that you'll be back with us again.
It won't always be this cold, if you're cold.
I realize one of our readers is from Alaska,
and she's traveled from Alaska.
And so we're not impressing Annie right now
with our cold tolerance.
Coming up next week at the center, there's a reading.
It's our annual Morgan Lucas Schuldt Memorial reading.
And the two poets that are going to be here for that
are the poet Susan Nguyen, who's coming down
from Phoenix behind her first book,
and her work with Hayden's Ferry Review
at Arizona State University.
And then the poet Andrew Grace, who's
going to travel here from Ohio and read from his latest
book about the Midwest.
And we're thrilled to have both of those poets here.
That's back here in this space at the Poetry
Center at 7 o'clock on Thursday of next week.
Coming up on Saturday, March 7, we
have the state finals for Arizona for Poetry Out Loud.
And so this is a contest where high school students memorize
poems, and then say them out loud in a kind but competitive
format.
And so there's classroom winners, and then
school winners, and regional winners.
And so what we're determining on the 7th is the state winners
from the Southern, Central and Northern regions.
So we'll have students from all over Arizona here in Tucson.
If you're worried about the state of the world,
hearing young people say poems that they've
put in their brains, and can do without looking at anything
is a sign of order in the world.
And so that's at 1 o'clock.
And if you want to come cheer them on,
I know that they would be excited to see you in the crowd.
And it's a fun thing to be a part of.
After that, there's a little bit of a break at the Poetry Center.
But there is this thing in Tucson called the Tucson
Festival of Books, which is coming again, and that is large.
And there's some amazing voices who
are going to be here for that.
If you've not seen the list yet, I
encourage you to go look at some of the folks who
are going to come for that.
Writers like Salman Rushdie will be here.
But also, it will be a true laureate fest this year
at the book festival, which is remarkable.
So Arthur Sze, the current US poet laureate, will be here.
Joy Harjo, a former US poet laureate, will be here.
Alberto Ríos, the outgoing Arizona poet laureate,
will be here, as well as Arizona's newly named poet
laureate, Laura Tohe, will be here reading from her work.
And then the newly named Tucson poet laureate, who we don't even
know who that is yet, it's still in the process,
will give one of their first readings
at the Festival of books as they're appointed
by the mayor of Tucson.
So lots going on.
In addition and beyond those, there's
more poets, more writers, and many others.
That's the 14th and 15th of March on the main mall of the U
of A campus, and in spaces around there.
And so I encourage you to go online, and look at those,
and see what's happening.
It is my great pleasure to get out of the way now.
But before I do that, I want to thank
two folks that have helped make the events tonight possible.
And so one is the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
here on campus.
We're grateful for their support of making
events happen on campus.
And then a huge kudos to our great friend Peggy Shumaker,
who's also helped make events happen around poetry in Tucson,
and in other places in the country.
And we're incredibly grateful for that kindness,
and for that love and that care.
Peggy is going to introduce our readers tonight.
She is the author, most recently,
of the wonderful poetry collection Still Water Carving
Light.
Please help me welcome Peggy Shumaker.
[APPLAUSE]