The Wordsmiths Reading Series began its Fall 2025 roster with readings from distinguished authors Amy Small-McKinney and Jennifer Tseng.

Held in Tyler Hall on Bucks County Community College’s Newtown campus, an intimate group attended alongside the featured authors. Wordsmiths director Dr. Ethel Rackin, with assistance from fellow Bucks professor Dr. Charlie Groth, warmly received the guests.

The event began with approximately attendees total, including a handful of Bucks students, and local poets and poetry-enthusiasts. Rackin welcomed the attendees, expressing her particular enthusiasm for the featured authors – nodding to Small-McKinney and Tseng’s “particularly impressive bio’s” of accomplishments and accolades which could not be summarized in their entirely in a few introductory minutes. Honoring the words of her dear colleague, the late Dr. Christopher Bursk, Rackin reminded the audience of, “our biological imperative to buy books.”

Small-McKinney read from her 2025 release “& You Think It Ends,” beginning with an epigraph from Linda Hogen’s “When the Body”: “When the body wishes to speak, she will.” Small-McKinney’s book features delicately considered poems of life in the wake of sexual violence and rape. Small-McKinney relays, “the poems came out of the newspapers, tv news, stories both mine and those I’ve heard.”

She prefaced the reading saying, “The first section is a little tough,” inviting the audience to experience the early “tough” poems, such as “This Is What I Remember,” wherein she catalogues violence committed against herself and specific women globally, as well as the later sections’ restorative poetry, like “Perfect Violins”— a poem detailing “transformation and possibility of multiple selves”.

Small-McKinney felt moved by recent events to read her poem, “The Limits of Language,” which describes a prospective school shooter turning away from violence through a series of “let’s say” propositions and ecological imagery. She clarifies, “I wasn’t planning to read [the poem] but it felt appropriate in light of what’s happening [in the news].”

When asked later on the emotional labor of re-reading these poems, she answered, “It has taken me forever to process these things in writing, but to feel the impact, the unity helped me finish. The poems kept emerging and emerging and emerging and they’re finished now. I am not upset anymore with [the subject matter of the poems] but I am finished with them” especially now that she is writing new poetry.

Tseng, as a habit in her readings, chose to begin with another poet’s work. In honor of the recently passed Franny Howe, Tseng recited Howe’s poem “10:18,” from which she whispered its final line, “Human was God’s secret name,” confessing after — “it is my favorite line. Not just by her but by anyone.”

Tseng dedicated her reading from her 2024 release “Thanks for Letting Us Know You’re Alive” to her late father, for whom the book of poems is written about. Tseng describes the writing of the book as “collaborating with the dead” as she incorporates lines her father’s letters to her in the poems’ titles alongside “bits of his words mangled about the poems.” Tseng shared a key insight from her writing process, to “trust your obsessions.” Something Tseng said applied “more with this book than any other book.”

On composing this work, Tseng explicitly clarifies that neither the book itself nor this reading captures the breadth of her father as a person or as a father to her – “there were so many versions, so many lines of his I didn’t use, so many arrangements of the lines I did use.” The letters themselves were written in a period of over 20 years, 1984-2007.

Tseng expressed her fascination toward the disparate selves her father allowed himself to be in letters versus in person – “he was at times a different person inside his letters than outside. Some things he wouldn’t say in writing that he would say every day, and some things he never said aloud, I would read in his letters to me.” Tseng offers a phrase he would say in both daily life and in writing: “But we two can never divorce each other,” a line Tseng titles a poem after.

Tseng remembers her father as “an immensely passionate person which was complicated by his two languages. At times he used the English language, other times the language used him.” On her learning Chinese in her young adulthood, Tseng recalled a time she had a conversation over the phone with her father completely in Chinese – how happy he was she made such progress in her studies.

In Teng’s writing, language acts as a restorative tool for connection and care, emphasized in the poem, “I never read one word Toni Morrison wrote” where Toni Morrison’s name in her father’s penmanship (the title is taken from a letter from him) transforms into a symbol of hope and atemporal connection between Tseng’s young Morrison-loving self and her father’s passing reference.

Tseng closes her reading with the book’s penultimate poem, “Please ask your mother one more time to drop the warrant for my arrest.” The poem itself captures the project of the poetry book in the fresh feeling of grief as it paradoxically resounds through Tseng’s communion with her father through his letters. She writes in her father’s first language “请进，请坐” (“come in, please sit”) to this memory of her father.