Phosphorescence May 2025 featured poets:
Joy Ladin, Niina Pollari, and Joan Larkin
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:
Joy Ladin has long worked at the tangled intersection of literature and transgender identity. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Shekhinah Speaks; National Jewish Book Award winner The Book of Anna; and Lambda Literary Award finalists Transmigration and Impersonation, reissued in a revised edition as a free PDF from DoubleBack in April 2023. She is also the author of a critical study, Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American poetry; a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life; and another work of creative non-fiction, Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger. Family, a poetry collection, and Once Out of Nature, a collection of essays on the transformation of gender – were published by Persea in 2024. Her work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, among other honors.
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.
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