Words Like Blades: CooXooEii Black, Emily Skaja, & Marcus Wicker

CooXooEii Black, Emily Skaja, & Marcus Wicker will read on Zoom as part of the "Words Like Blades" reading series, hosted by 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 Wednesday, September 23, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. eastern time (ET).

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CooXooEii Black is an Afro-Indigenous poet from the Wind River Reservation and a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. He is the author of The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky, which won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in multiple publications, including Poetry Magazine, Agni, Eco Theo Review, Palette Poetry, and Carve Magazine. Black received his Master of Fine Art in creative writing from the University of Memphis. His poetry is deeply rooted in his Afro-Indigenous heritage, oral tradition, exploring childhood memories, reservation life, land, and faith. 

Emily Skaja is the author of BRUTE, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and BLACK LAKE, forthcoming from Graywolf in September 2026. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she is the founding editor of the Poetry Prompt Generator, an online resource for poets and educators. She was educated at Millikin University (BA), Temple University (MA), Purdue University (MFA), and the University of Cincinnati (PhD), and is now an Associate Professor in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.

Marcus Wicker is the author of three books of poetry: Dear Mothership (Ecco, forthcoming, September 2026), Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), a National Poetry Series selection. A 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. He is a Professor and the Orgill Chair of English at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.

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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.