Words Like Blades: Donna Masini, Christopher Kondrich, and Alicia Wright

Donna Masini, Christopher Kondrich, and Alicia Wright 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, May 28 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. eastern time (ET).

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Donna Masini is the author of a novel and four poetry collections, most recently Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Best American Poetry,  Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, TriQuarterly, Paris Review. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Christopher Kondrich's third book, Tread Upon, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. His previous collection, Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), was a winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and was selected by Library Journal as a best book of the year. His poetry appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is currently Poet-in-Residence in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

Alicia Wright is the author of You’re Called By The Same Sound (Thirdhand Books, 2025) and the essay chapbook A Coin, A Moth, A Literary Journal (DoubleCross Press, 2026). She lives in Iowa City, where she serves as editor of Annulet and Annulet Editions, works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review, and hosts the reading series Normie Creep in the Sacred Grove.

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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.