WLB: Kristina Marie Darling, grace (ge) gilbert, & Ellen Kombiyil

Kristina Marie Darling, grace (ge) gilbert, and Ellen Kombiyil will read on Zoom as part of the "Words Like Blades" reading series, hosted by Jennifer Franklin, Jane Huffman, Nathan McClain, and Ren Wilding. A Q&A will follow. Admission is free, but registration is required. Registered guests will receive a Zoom link and password prior to the start of the event. Registered guests will have the opportunity to send donations directly to the readers (to be split three ways) before, during, and after the event via Venmo or PayPal. This event will be held on Thursday, August 27 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. eastern time (ET).

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Kristina Marie Darling is the author of more than thirty books, with recent titles published by Bloomsbury, Persea, Dzanc, and Penguin Canada.  A recognized leader in higher education and the literary arts, Dr. Darling has held Fulbright appointments as a Specialist, or “expert in the field,” advising universities on pedagogy, curriculum design, faculty development, and international academic partnerships. She has served as visiting faculty, researcher, or scholar at institutions throughout Europe, Africa, and the United States, while maintaining permanent faculty appointments with the Ionion Center for the Arts & Culture and several graduate creative writing programs.  An accomplished public speaker, Dr. Darling has delivered keynote addresses, masterclasses, and invited lectures at the Clews Foundation’s Threshold Retreat Series at Chateau de la Napoule on the French Riviera, Stanford University, Yale University, Columbia University in the City of New York, the University of Zadar, the Leysin American School in Switzerland, the American University of Rome, and writers' conferences across Europe and North America.

Her honors include the 2026 National HerStory Award from the Women’s Federation for World Peace, fifteen juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome, three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, a Visiting Artist appointment with the Andorran Ministry of Culture, and numerous other international fellowships recognizing her contributions to literature, education, and the public humanities.  She currently divides her time between Greece, Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and Malta, where she is a candidate for honorary citizenship. 

grace (ge) gilbert is a poet, writer and collage artist. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where they now teach. they are the author of Holly (YesYes Books, 2026), a hybrid image and text book about the 1976 murder of their paternal grandmother. recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, the Drift, the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Pleiades, the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. They teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at Brooklyn Poets, Minne

Ellen Kombiyil (she/her) is a visual artist and author of two books and two chapbooks, most recently The American Journal of Insanity’s Diagnostic on the Plumbing & Wiring of Females (Visual Poetry Series Award, Anhinga 2026), and Love as Invasive Species (Cornerstone 2024). She is a 2022 and 2025 recipient of a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a 2025 winner of the Geri Digiorno Multi-Genre Prize, and 2025 winner of the Tupelo Quarterly Prize for Cross-Disciplinary Writing. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, and Ploughshares. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Hunter College in New York City. Find out more at ellenkombiyil.com.

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About the series: During this dark time for the country & the world, poets and scholars Jennifer Franklin, Jane Huffman, Nathan McClain, and Ren Wilding have come together with the goal to gather once a month to listen to poets read their new work as an act of refuge and an act of resistance. Our series is founded on James Baldwin's belief that, "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... If you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it." The four curators plan to pair a diverse group of established poets & emerging poets (with new or recent collections) and, when possible, focus on Mentors and Mentees reading together to calm, center, and inspire activism and positive change. At its core, this series will focus on inclusivity and celebrating connections.