Words Like Blades: Diane Seuss, Mary Helen Callier, & Daniel Ruiz

Diane Seuss, Mary Helen Callier, & Daniel Ruiz 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 recieve 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 24, 2025, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm eastern time (ET).

Mary Helen Callier’s debut collection, When the Horses, was the winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice. She received her MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as a poetry editor for Denver Quarterly. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Hopkins Review, DIAGRAM, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Her critical writing has appeared in Annulet and FIVES and has been presented at the Louisville Conference for Literature and Culture and the Canadian Association for Italian Studies. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and currently lives in Denver.

Diane Seuss’s sixth collection is Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pen Voelcker Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2021 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seuss is a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. Seuss’s seventh collection, Althea: poems, is forthcoming in 2027.

Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican and Cuban poet and translator, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and Florida State University, and a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series. In 2016, he was a Fulbright Scholar to Chile. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where he edits poetry and translations for the Denver Quarterly.

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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.