This conversation will take place in the Dorothy Rubel Room at the University of Arizona Poetry Center or in favorable weather conditions in the immediately adjacent breezeway. 

Join us for monthly poetry discussions, led by docents from the UA Poetry Center. The event is free, and no preparation or knowledge of poetry is necessary to participate.  A reading packet will be shared.  For anyone who enjoys poetry or learning more about poets in a conversational setting, this informal gathering includes many opportunities to contribute to the conversation and ask questions. It is also a great way to meet people in the community who have similar interests. The discussion will feature the work of poet Ofelia Zepeda and Alison Deming. 

Alison Hawthorne Deming  has two books forthcoming in 2025: the poetry anthology The Gift of Animals: A Celebration of Animals and the People Who Love Them from Storey Press and the new poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower from Red Hen Press. Her most recent nonfiction book A WOVEN WORLD: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress was published by Counterpoint Press in 2021. Her most recent poetry books are Stairway to Heaven (Penguin 2016) and Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom (George F. Thomson 2016). The essay collection Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014. She is the author of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), Genius Loci (Penguin Poets, 2005), and Rope (Penguin Poets, 2009); and three additional nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996), The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real (Milkweed, Credo Series). She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1996) and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed, 2002; revised and expanded edition, 2011).

Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O’odham poet and professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her works include Where Clouds are Formed (2008), Ocean Power (1995), Home Places: Contemporary Native American Writing from Sun Tracks (1995), A Papago Grammar (1983), and When It Rains, Papago and Pima Poetry = Mat hekid o ju, ‘O’odham Na-cegitodag (1982).