Phosphorescence September 2025 featured poets:
Livia Meneghin, Meg Day, and Rajiv Mohabir
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
This virtual program is free to attend. 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:
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and feathering. She’s been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review’s Peseroff Prize, The Room’s Poetry Contest, and the Writers’ Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Homes where you can find her writing include in CV2, Gasher, Mom Egg Review, Osmosis, Thrush. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing, and is the Reads Editor at Sundress Publications. She is a cancer survivor.
Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Day is the 2024 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at NC State.
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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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.
Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide including Amherst College. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow in Writing.
Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released from Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, and photographer born and raised in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants, and she currently resides in Mississippi. Her debut full-length collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed, is forthcoming with CavanKerry Press in March 2025, and it was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Her writing and photography have been published widely, and she has received several awards and honors including a 2025 Literary Arts Fellowship and a 2024 Artist Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a 2024 Mississippi STAR Teacher Award, a 2024 Vance Fellowship from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the 2023 Poet of the Year Honoree of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a semifinalist position in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, a nomination for the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award, and an honorable mention prize in the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award for poetry. Nadia’s photography has been exhibited in several shows in the U.S., Cuba, and virtually. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, The Watering Hole, and the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Publicity Incubator, she holds a PhD and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi.
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.
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. 
IN-PERSON PROGRAM
(Wednesday, September 13, 2023, AMHERST, MA) – Today the Emily Dickinson Museum announces the premiere of its online collection database. The Museum’s collection had remained largely undocumented and inaccessible until a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2019 funded the documentation and baseline cataloging of the entire collection for the very first time. This project has improved collection care, providedpublic access to the collection, will strengthen the museum’s interpretation, and open promising new research opportunities.
The Museum’s general audience tours are led by knowledgeable guides who introduce Dickinson’s journey as a poet, with an emphasis on sharing her poems and letters.