Ai Ogawa’s “Killing Floor” book launch & reception on October 13, at UA Poetry Center
5 to 7:30 p.m., 1508 E. Helen St. Tucson
“Join us in a celebration of Ai, one of Tucson’s great poets, and hear readings from her critically acclaimed second book and from the Poetry Center’s voca archives. Event offered in partnership with Tavern Books, which is republishing a 40th anniversary edition of the previously out-of-print collection.
After the readings, we’ll be hosting a reception with drinks and light snacks, free and open to the public.”
From Poemhunter.com:
Ai Ogawa (fna Florence Anthony)
“Ai, who has described herself as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas in 1947, and she grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Raised also in Las Vegas and San Francisco, she majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism.
Florence Anthony was a National Book Award winning American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for Vice.
She legally changed her name to “Ai,” which means “love” in Japanese. She said “Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known. Since I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop, and I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father’s identity from me, I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity.”