Oct 23 2008 - UA Award-Winning Poets to Share Their Work

Luci Tapahonso and Ofelia Zepeda, two well-known University of Arizona authors and poets, will celebrate the release of their new works this month.

The UA Poetry Center and the UA Press are teaming up to host a book release party for the authors: Tapahonso's "A Radiant Curve" and Zepeda's "Where Clouds Are Formed."

The Oct. 23 event will begin at 8 p.m. in the Dorothy Rubel Room at the UA Poetry Center, 1508 E. Helen St.

Tapahonso – an award-winning Navajo poet and professor – will read from her new book, which is her sixth collection of stories and verse.

A UA American Indian Studies and English professor, Tapahonso finds sacredness in everyday life. Whether viewing a sunset in a desert sky, listening to her granddaughter recount how she spent her day or visiting her mother after her father has died, Tapahonso said she finds traces of her own memories along with echoes of the voices of her Navajo ancestors.

She weaves the Navajo language into her work like she weaves "the first four rows of black yarn" into a rug she is making "for my little grandson, who inherited my father's name: Hastiin Tsétah Naaki Bísóí."

Tapahonso is the author of three children's books and six books of poetry, including "Blue Horses Rush In," which was awarded the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association's 1998 Regional Book Award in Poetry. In 2006 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

Zepeda – an award-winning Tohono O'odham poet and professor– will also read from her new book during the Oct. 23 event.

A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education, Zepeda has devoted her life to the preservation of her native language and customs and is a poet who possesses a kind of double vision, seeing the contemporary world through her own highly observant eyes and, at the same time, through the eyes of her ancestors.

Zepeda, a Regents' Professor in the UA linguistics department, is as clear-eyed about the past as she is about the present and recalls waiting for the school bus on a cold morning inside her father's truck, listening to the sounds of the engine, the windshield wipers, and the "soft rain on the hood."

In the present, she sees both the frustration and the humor in a woman she observes trying to eat pancakes with one hand while her other resides in a cast. She said: "Watching her, I realize eating pancakes is a two-handed job." Whatever Zepeda sees, she filters through her second set of eyes, which keep the past always present.

Zepeda is the author of two previous books of poetry, including "Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert" and also the first grammar textbook of the Tohono O'odham language, "A Tohono O'odham Grammar."