Words Like Blades: Oliver de la Paz, Mai Der Vang, & Patrick Donnelly

Oliver de la Paz, Mai Der Vang, and Patrick Donnelly will read on Zoom as the inaugural event in the new "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, May 15, 2025, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm eastern time (ET).

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (2023), was the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award for Poetry, and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a Northern California Book Award. Yellow Rain was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Voelcker Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the California Book Awards. Her first collection, Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her third collection, Primordial, was released this year from Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, espnW, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. Based in California, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025). Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is program director of The Frost Place, a center for poetry and the arts at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The VirginiaQuarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award.