Words Like Blades: D. Nurkse, Dorsía Smith Silva, & Joanna Solfrian

D. Nurkse, Dorsía Smith Silva, and Joanna Solfrian 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, July 16 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. eastern time (ET).

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D. Nurkse's twelfth poetry collection A Country of Strangers, a "new and selected," was published by Knopf in n 2022.

Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a category finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award, Eric Hoffer Award, Whirling Prize, and Da Vinci Eye Award, reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and recommended by Ms. Magazine. She is a Poetry Editor at The Hopper and Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Literary Hub, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, and The Beloit Poetry Journal have published her work, and she has received support from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and SWWIM. Moreover, she is the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering.

Joanna Solfrian is the author of the poetry collections Temporary Beast, The Second Perfect Number, The Mud Room, and Visible Heavens, which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Wick First Book Poetry Prize. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a six-time Pushcart nominee. Joanna lives and works in New York City. www.joannasolfrian.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.