Poets Annie Guthrie and Richard Siken will kick off a University of Arizona Poetry Center series featuring prominent writers with Southern Arizona roots.
Guthrie and Siken read together at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 10, followed by poet and National Book Award winner Mark Doty on Oct. 1; Arizona State Poet Laureate Alberto Álvaro Ríos on Oct. 5; and International Griffin Prize winner and poet Brenda Hillman on Oct. 22. Poets will give readings, sign books and hold class visits at the UA Poetry Center.
Guthrie is a published and contest-winning poet and an established jeweler known for her one-of-a-kind pieces. Tupelo Press will publish her first collection of poetry Oct. 15. It is available for preorder and will be available at Thursday’s reading.
“It’s a monumental occasion for me to take part in the Poetry Center Reading and Lecture series, a series that has been recording prose and poetry for almost 60 years,” Guthrie said. “I am thrilled to kick this season off with fellow Tucsonan, poet Richard Siken.
People are also reading…
You might recognize Siken’s head.
Tucson resident Siken was born in New York and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees here. His first book, “Crush,” was selected for the 2004 Yale Younger Poets award. His poetry flashes on areader board at the Sun Link streetcar terminus near the Poetry Center and the “Poet” sculpture, 6-foot-tall head with a skin of cutout steel letters, was modeled after Siken’s head by artists Simon Donovan and Ben Olmstead.
Complementing the reading series, a community discussion of Doty’s work is set for Sept. 29 and a library exhibit, “Eight Baja Arizona Writers,” is on display through Nov. 21.
Several display cases in the center’s Jeremy Ingalls Gallery are filled with eclectic items, such as Siken’s Master of Fine Arts thesis which is an early draft of his first book, curated from the Poetry Center’s institutional archives.Poets featured are: Ai, Eduardo C. Corral, Doty, Hillman, Alice Notley, Ríos, Siken and Ofelia Zepeda.
In addition, you can hear more than 800 recorded readings of poems and the authors’ commentary on the work, their writing process and their philosophies on the Poetry Center’s online Voca collection. The recordings dating back to 1963 have been fully digitized. Find a reading by Guthrie and three by Siken at voca.arizona.edu
Annie Guthrie
Richard Siken
