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An illustrated talk and birthday celebration with Emily Dickinson Museum Director Jane Wald

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During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson remained solidly and agreeably planted in Amherst—a known but ultimately withdrawn member of one of the town’s leading families, perhaps known better as a baker than as a poet. Following her death in 1886, the poet’s words came to light through the work of posthumous editors who sought to fill in the story for the public. Now, at the 191st anniversary of her birthday, Dickinson’s poetry speaks powerfully to readers all over the world, but her life seems even more contested in the popular imagination than ever before. Can we know “the real Emily Dickinson”? Would she want us to? Would we even want to? 

In this illustrated talk, Emily Dickinson Museum Executive Director Jane Wald evokes these fraught questions and controversies through an exploration of early biographer and editor Martha Dickinson Bianchi at the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birth, tracing interpretations through contemporary creative portrayals of the poet such as AppleTV’s ‘Dickinson’ starring Hailee Steinfeld, and right back to the ongoing preservation and interpretive work at the poet’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

This program is presented in partnership with the Amherst College Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

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Image courtesy of Apple TV

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You are cordially invited to the Emily Dickinson Museum’s virtual celebration of the poet’s 191st birthday! On Friday, December 10, join us for an afternoon exploring behind-the-scenes at the Emily Dickinson Museum while we remain closed to the public for our biggest restoration project ever. We will toast to Dickinson’s enduring legacy, and share the ways the Museum is working to preserve her home and story. This program contains sneak-peeks at the new interiors you’ll see when we reopen in spring 2022, and we’ll also be making a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT with our friends over at Apple TV’s Dickinson! We can hardly wait to share it with you!

All are welcome to this free program but registration is required.

Give a Birthday Gift
It’s not a birthday party without gifts! If you’re looking to honor Emily Dickinson with a birthday present, please consider a donation to the Museum to support our free virtual programs which are made possible with your support. Gifts of all sizes are deeply appreciated.

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About Dickinson’s Birthday

Emily Dickinson, the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830, in the family Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. She celebrated 55 birthdays before her death in 1886. As an adult she wrote, “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” (Johnson L379)

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About the artists:

Nicole M. Young is a performer, poet, playwright, director, event producer/curator, and nonprofit professional with over 20 years of experience combined in these areas. Nicole has worked across various disciplines, including theatre, poetry, and classical music. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Nicole currently resides in Northern Connecticut and works in Western Massachusetts. Nicole released her debut spoken word album, In/Put: Live from the Valley in 2019. It was recorded at CLICK Workspace in Northampton, MA in 2018. Proceeds from the album were used to create a fellowship program for emerging women and nonbinary writers of color through Straw Dog Writers Guild. Nicole is the editor of the chapbook, Locating Me, which is the culmination of a 10-week writing workshop hosted by Attack Bear Press she facilitated in early 2020.

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, July 2020) and two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry, the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and a 2020 Denis Diderot [A-i-R] Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in Orquevaux, France. Surin’s work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls “broken spaces” and his poems have been featured in numerous publications and exhibits. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, teaches creative writing and literature at Bunker Hill Community College and is President and Director of Faraday Publishing.

Rage Hezekiah is a New England-based poet and educator, who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She is a Cave Canem, MacDowell, and Ragdale Fellow, and received the Saint Botolph Foundation’s Emerging Artists Award. Her chapbook Unslakable (Paper Nautilus Press, 2019) is a Vella Chapbook Award Winner. Stray Harbor is her debut full-length collection (Finishing Line Press, 2019).

Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Bedstuy. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021) which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017) published by Boat Press. Brionne has received fellowships to Cave Canem, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Community of Writers in Squaw Valley, Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook. Brionne is a recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, and the winner of the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Prize judged by Kwame Dawes. Their poetry has been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Sun Magazine, The Los Angelas Review, Brooklyn Poets, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Off the page they go by Breezy. 

Melanie Henderson is a Washington, DC native poet, editor, publisher and photographer. She is the author of Elegies for New York Avenue, winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. 

Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series, apt, B O D Y, Boiler Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Muzzle, PANK, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, she received her MFA in poetry from University of Massachusetts Boston, where she currently teaches. 

Lisa Pegram is a writer, educator, arts integration specialist and literary publicist. Her chapbook Cracked Calabash was published by Central Square Press and she is contributing author of The Next Verse Mixtape vol. 1. She has over 20 years of experience in high-level program design for such organizations as the Smithsonian Institute, Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Geographic. Passionate about the arts as a tool for activism, she served as DC WritersCorps program director for a decade, and as co-chair of United Nations affiliate international women’s conferences in the US, India and Bali. Lisa completed her MFA at Lesley University and has an Executive Certification in Arts & Culture Strategies from UPenn. A Washington, DC native, she is currently based in the Caribbean where, in addition to her literary pursuits, she is a personal chef aka food poet.

Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Festival events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival. 

2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Part of the 2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:

“Drama is never dead” wrote Emily Dickinson, “Everything is as good as it is dramatic,” wrote Robert Frost. But what is drama in poetry? By turning the lenses of drama on the poems we read and onto our own drafts, we will think about how the theatrical cues of place, voice, and address make a poem legible to us, and help a poem to feel spoken and embodied across time. In this masterclass, we’ll read a few Amherst poets and a few poets from the great wider literary tradition. Using lenses and techniques we learn, we’ll turn our eyes towards our own drafts, seeing how we can refine them for resonance and reverberation.

Closed captioning will be available for this program!

Participants in this program will not be able to turn on their cameras or microphones, but are encouraged to follow along with Tess from home as she facilitates exercises with a group of students. All participants are encouraged to enter questions into the typed Q&A during the program.

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Tess Taylor is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning.”  Her second book, Work & Days, was hailed as “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephanie Burt and named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Last West, Taylor’s third book, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures and is currently being adapted for the stage by the Poet’s Theatre. Her most recent book, Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, was hailed “brilliant” by Stephanie Danler in the LA Times and “stunning” by Naomi Shihab Nye in The New York Times. Taylor’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. She served as Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland and was most recently the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. Taylor has served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She grew up and lives again in El Cerrito, California.

Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Festival events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival. 

2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Part of the 2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:

Settle in for an evening of poetry celebrating Emily Dickinson’s ongoing creative legacy with the work of two internationally acclaimed contemporary female poets. Headliners Tracy K. Smith and Tiana Clark will read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration. Don’t miss out on this special evening of community through art and conversation that will dazzle you with the necessity of poetry, or in Smith’s words, “a means of living more deeply with reality”.

Live captioning will be available at this event!

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About the artists:

Tracy K. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States, during which she traveled across America, hosting poetry readings and conversations in rural communities. She edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time during her laureateship, and launched the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown.  In March 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and the 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Festival events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival. 

2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself

– (fragment F729)

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Marylou Davis is a specialist in documentation, conservation, design, and replication of decorative paints and gilding on historic architectural surfaces and objects. Davis’ work includes: replications of 19th-century factory made block printed floorcloths installed at the Gardner-Pingree House, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, CT; replicated flame mahogany wood graining at Boscobel Restoration at Garrison, NY, and cedar graining in the George Washington bedchamber at the Joseph Webb House in Wethersfield, CT. Marylou’s’ work has increasingly turned toward project management for restoration projects within historic churches and house museums. At the Emily Dickinson Homestead she has worked with Director Jane Wald in surveying extant physical and written evidence toward the restoration now in progress.

Emily Dickinson International Society

“‘Stratford on Avon’ – accept us all!”

Dickinson and Shakespeare:

2021 Annual Meeting

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August 6+7
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