Words Like Blades: Lisa Ampleman, Dustin Brookshire, & Denise Duhamel

Lisa Ampleman, Dustin Brookshire, and Denise Duhamel 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, July 17, 2025, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. eastern time (ET).

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Lisa Ampleman is the author of a chapbook and three full-length books of poetry, most recently Mom in Space (2024) and Romances (2020), both with LSU Press. Her work has appeared recently on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and in journals including 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Cortland Review, Ecotone, Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. She lives in Cincinnati and is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.

Dustin Brookshire (he/him), the 2024 recipient of the Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship, is the author of four chapbooks: Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, 2025), Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is a co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023) and editor of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton (Harbor Editions, 2024). The curator of the Zoom-based Wild & Precious Life Series, find him online at dustinbrookshire.com.

Denise Duhamel is the author of Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored six collections, the most recent of which is Tilt (Bridwell Press, 2025.) Denise’s collaborations with Julie Marie Wade include The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025). A recipient of NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, she is a distinguished university professor at Florida International University in Miami.

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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.