VIRTUAL PROGRAM
This event has limited capacity, we encourage you to register in advance.
Registrants are encouraged to choose a “Pay Your Way” ticket that supports the cost of Museum programs. Free tickets are also available at registration
Celebrate the 196th birthday of Emily Dickinson with an evening exploring the intersection of poetry, art, and the natural world. In connection with our temporary exhibition The Preferred Flower — Paintings by Mabel Loomis Todd, this special virtual gathering brings together Dickinson scholar Christopher Benfey and botanist Peter Grima to examine how Dickinson’s study of flora inspired her poetic imagination.
This year there are three programs to celebrate Dickinson’s birthday with us!:
Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute
with Rebecca Lehmann
Co-Presented with the Folger Shakespeare Library
Tuesday, Dec 8, 2026, 7:30pm
Paid Online or In-Person (at the Folger) Program
The Preferred Flower: A Dickinson Birthday Celebration
Thursday, December 10, 6pm ET
Virtual Program
196th Birthday Open House
Saturday, December 12, 1-4:45pm ET
In-Person Program
Celebrate Emily Dickinson’s 196th Birthday with a Gift in her Honor
Emily Dickinson, the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830, in the family Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. She celebrated 55 birthdays before her death in 1886. As an adult she wrote, “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” (Johnson L379) This year, as we celebrate Emily’s 196th birthday, we invite you to honor her with a gift to the Museum. Your contribution to the Emily Dickinson Fund keeps her voice vibrant and her story alive for generations to come. Thank you!
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Christopher Benfey is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College. Critic, essayist, and author whose reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement established him as a contemporary arbiter of modern and late twentieth-century American literature. Interests and scholarship transcend academic disciplines and range from art and literature to social history. In addition to work on literary figures and movements, is known as an Emily Dickinson scholar. Served as an art critic for Slate and contributed to Travel + Leisure. Literary studies include The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992), Degas in New Orleans (1997), and A Summer of Hummingbirds (2008), which won the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa. Author of a family memoir, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay (2012). Poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Pequod, and Ploughshares. Honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Peter Grima is a botanist and writer based in western Massachusetts. He is coauthor of the 2020 Vascular Flora of Franklin County Massachusetts, a recent update to the 2008 Flora of the Greater Mount Holyoke Range, as well as a forthcoming flora of Mount Toby (to the immediate north of Amherst). His expertise with the native flora of the greater Amherst area has recently intersected with Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, and forthcoming work will focus on portraying Dickinson as an accomplished field botanist.