Phosphorescence July 2022 featured poets:
Terry Blackhawk, Dolores Hayden, and Marilyn Nelson
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 Poetry Reading 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. The 2022 Series will be a virtual event to ensure the health and safety of participants. While we are disappointed not to gather together in Amherst, we are excited to connect with a global community of friends and writers. Join us on the last Thursdays of 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:
Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk is Founding Director (1995-2015) of InsideOut Literary Arts Project dedicated to amplifying the voices of Detroit youth. While still a high school Creative Writing teacher, Blackhawk won a National Endowment for the Humanities “Teacher Scholar” sabbatical (1992-1993) to study Emily Dickinson. Other awards are the 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize and grants from Michigan Council for the Arts and Kresge Arts in Detroit. Her five full- length poetry collections include Escape Artist (2003), winner of the John Ciardi Prize, and One Less River, named a Top 2019 Indie Poetry Title by Kirkus Reviews. A fourth chapbook, Maumee, Maumee, is forthcoming from Alice Greene & Co.
terrymblackhawk.com
Dolores Hayden, urban historian and poet, is professor emerita at Yale University. Her books on the American landscape include The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History and Building Suburbia. Her poems appear in many journals and anthologies including Poetry, Raritan, Ecotone, Yale Review, The Common, and Best American Poetry. She is the author of three poetry collections: American Yard, Nymph, Dun, and Spinner, and Exuberance, set in the earliest years of American aviation when daredevil pilots—women and men—thrilled spectators who had never seen an airplane.
doloreshayden.com
Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. She is also the author of the biography Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life (2022). Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Frost Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.
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.