Phosphorescence June 2025 featured poets:
Barbara Mossberg, Bridget Lowe, and Rachelle Toarmino
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
This virtual program is free to attend and will be streamed live from the Homestead. Registration is required.
To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.
About this month’s poets:
Barbara Mossberg is a wordsy and passionate person who will think your story is just what our world needs, author of just released Clown Cantos: Everything Is Alive In Its Own Way, Singing, and the recent Here for the Present: A Grammar of Happiness in the Present Imperfect, Live from the Poet’s Perch, and Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror Is Not You and other hopeful news postings, Professor Mossberg’s distinguished career of five decades as a prizewinning poet, author, teacher, and honored educational leader, is dedicated to a wildly out-of-the-world optimism and brave faith. Mossberg ascribes to Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility”–despite how things seem, it is possible to find the beauty—and hope. President Emerita Goddard College, founding Dean California State University Monterey Bay, Professor of Practice at Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, former National Council of Research on Women Senior Fellow, and American Council on Education Senior Fellow, Mossberg uses her public platforms to promote the power of words in each of our lives and human fates. She has been recognized by National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon Foundation (Aspen Institute) and others, twice named the Senior Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, and a current Fulbright Specialist. At the University of Oregon, she has been awarded the Clark Honors College Faculty Innovation Fellowship, and the University’s highest teaching honors, the Williams Fellowship, and Ersted Award, as well as is nominated for the national teaching Cherry Award at Baylor University.
Bridget Lowe is an American poet. In an early interview, Lowe expressed her interest in and commitment to “figures who are rejected by the same social groups for which they are expected to perform.” The Poetry Foundation elaborates “Her poetry is accordingly concerned with those who feel they are both looked at and invisible, who are exploited yet remain deeply unknown.” / Bridget Lowe was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She is the author of two collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon University Press: At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky in 2013, followed by My Second Work in 2020. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including multiple times in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, Parnassus, and the American Poetry Review. Her work has also appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology. Her honors include the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Discovery/92NY Poetry Award, a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship to MacDowell for an extended residency.
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor-in-chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.
Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence 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 our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.
Niina Pollari is a poet and Finnish translator. She is the author of the poetry collections Path of Totality (Soft Skull 2022) and Dead Horse (Birds, LLC 2015), as well as the co-author of the split chapbook Total Mood Killer (Tiger Bee Press 2017). She lives in Marshall, NC with her family. 
Joan Larkin‘s most recent book of poems is Old Stranger (Alice James Books, August 2024). She is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Blue Hanuman (2014); My Body: New and Selected Poems (2007), which received the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle; Lambda Literary Award winner Cold River (1997); and Housework (1975). With Jaime Manrique, Larkin translated Sor Juana’s Love Poems, a bilingual edition of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz’s poetry (1997). Her prose works include If You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (1998) and Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (1998). Her plays include The AIDS Passion, The Living, and Wiretap. / Larkin co-founded Out & Out Books during the 1970s feminist literary explosion and has co-edited four anthologies, including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time. A lifelong teacher, she has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Smith College, among others. Larkin has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She received the 2011 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
A Daisy for Dickinson: 
Avia Tadmor is the author of the poetry collection “Song in Tammuz,” winner of the Tupelo Press International Berkshire Prize, forthcoming 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, The New Republic, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Avia’s poetry received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation/ Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Previously, she has taught writing at Columbia University, where she directed the Columbia Artist/Teachers program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in NYC. Currently, she is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.
Silvia Bonilla was born and raised in South America. She received an MFA in Poetry from The New School. She is the author of a chapbook called “An Animal Startled by The Mechanisms of Life” (Deadly Chaps 2024) and “Town of Eves,” forthcoming from Arizona University Press. Her work has been featured in Blackbird, Green Mountains Review, Cream City Review, Reed, Cimarron Review, among others. She has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, The Staltonstall Foundation, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Community of Writers, Napa Valley, The Frost Place, Colgate Writers Workshop and The Post Graduate Conference at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Join us for a lively virtual discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters, meeting once a month from March to June. This program is designed to welcome newcomers and seasoned readers of Dickinson alike. 
This program is now SOLD OUT — please join us for the virtual birthday celebration. 
IN-PERSON PROGRAM
