Words Like Blades: Kathy Fagan, Mai-Linh Hong, & Shara McCallum

Kathy Fagan, Mai-Linh Hong, & Shara McCallum 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 Th. October 29, 2026, 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. ET, on Zoom

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Kathy Fagan’s newest collection is The Unbecoming (W.W. Norton, September 2026). Her sixth book, winner of Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and former NEA recipient, her first book won The National Poetry Series in 1984. Fagan is Professor Emerita of The Ohio State University, where she co-founded and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing while co-editing The Journal and its poetry book prize for OSU Press.

Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She publishes essays on Asian American and refugee literature in scholarly journals and anthologies. A lifelong crafter, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). She teaches literature at the University of California, Merced.

From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, No Ruined Stone, and Madwoman. Recognition for her work includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Poetry Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize. From 2003-2017 McCallum was Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry. From 2021-22 she served as Penn State Laureate. Presently she is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University and a 2026-27 Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds.

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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.