Phosphorescence July 2025 featured poets:
Lesley Wheeler and Nadia Alexis
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:
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of Mycocosmic (March 2025), runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and two books of poetry scholarship, the first of which, The Poetics of Enclosure, roots its arguments in Dickinson’s work. Wheeler’s writing has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop; her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
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.
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.