Arizona poet laureate to open Behrend's spring literary series Former Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Rios will open the Smith Creative Writers Reading Series at Penn State Behrend with a Jan. 28 reading on Zoom. Image: Contributed photo Arizona poet laureate to open Behrend's spring literary series January 14, 2021 At home, the poet Alberto Rios spoke Spanish. That’s common in the town of Nogales, which straddles Arizona’s southern border. At school, he was required to speak English. As he toggled between the two languages, he developed his own dialect, which hop-scotched elements of both cultures. “I have too often thought of the act of translation as simply giving something two names,” Rios, Arizona’s first poet laureate, once said. “It is not so. Not at all. A second name for something pushes it forward, forward and backward, and gives it another life.”