Words Like Blades: Malachi Black, Tyree Daye, and Dora Malech

Malachi Black, Tyree Daye, and Dora Malech 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, April 9 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. eastern time (ET). It will be hosted in partnership with The Amy Clampitt Residency Fund.

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Malachi Black is the author of two poetry collections: Indirect Light (Four Way Books, 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), the latter a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God (Yale U.P., 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2024). Black’s work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Yaddo. Black's poems have been featured in a variety of exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including several musical settings and translations into French, Dutch, Italian, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego. 

Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Dora Malech's most recent book of poetry is Trying × Trying (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025). Previous books of poetry include Flourish, Stet, Say So, and Shore Ordered Ocean; her poems appear in publications that include The New Yorker and Best American Poetry. She is coeditor of The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, cotranslator of Dolore Minimo by Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, and recipient of honors that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she is chair of the Writing Seminars and editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.

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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.