Part of the 2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:
In the final installment of this three-part series, go behind the scenes of the restoration of Emily Dickinson’s home with Museum Executive Director Jane Wald and special guest Jeff Baker, preservation architect and partner at Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects. The Emily Dickinson Museum is currently embarking on the most significant restoration project to date of the interior architectural features, finishes, and furnishings of the revered poet’s Homestead. This work will not only triple the amount of restored space in the Homestead accessible to guests, but will also add critical details to our understanding of Dickinson’s daily life by providing a more authentic experience of the house she inhabited. In this virtual program, learn how the documentary record yields clues about this historic house and hear first-hand about the research and decisions that go into restoration work.
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Jeff Baker has been with Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker for over thirty years and has been a firm Partner for over twenty years. After his graduation from Hudson Valley Community College, Jeff attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he earned a Bachelor’s of Building Science and a Bachelor’s of Architecture. Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker specializes in Architecture, Planning and Historic Preservation, and has overseen the success of several previous restoration projects at the Emily Dickinson Museum, as well as numerous other National Historic Landmarks.
A few examples of Jeff’s work include the restoration of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia; Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Lynchburg, Virginia; James Madison’s Montpelier, in Montpelier Station, Virginia; and the Newport Country Club in Newport, Rhode Island. Jeff has also been retained to assist in the restoration of George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia.
Learn more at mcwb-arch.com.
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2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule
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Tiana Clark 
Rodney A. Brown is a poet, writer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work draws on he(r) experiences with AIDS, mental illness, and homelessness. He(r) writing has appeared in the Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, and their performances on Black lives and mental health have been sponsored at the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Congress on Research in Dance and the United States Conference on AIDS. They taught as a choreographer at the university level and attended the Saint Francis College MFA program in creative writing. 
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of the chapbook, Bed (Tupelo, 2021), selected by Mark Bibbins for the Sunken Garden Poetry Contest, and Lying In, forthcoming from Milkweed in 2023. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers (UMass, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for a first book of poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief, 2017). She was the 2013 winner of the Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, and her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among other places. Her prose has recently been published in Conjunctions, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novel Sadness Is a White Bird (Atria Books, 2018), for which he received the National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ Honor, and which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Piece Prize, the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the winner of the Cincinnati Books by the Banks Author Award, and long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His essays and poems have been published in The Common Magazine, Haaretz, The New York Times, The Paris Review’s Daily, Runner’s World, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, ZYZZYVA Magazine, and elsewhere.
Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, July 2020) and two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry, the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and a 2020 Denis Diderot [A-i-R] Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in Orquevaux, France. Surin’s work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls “broken spaces” and his poems have been featured in numerous publications and exhibits. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, teaches creative writing and literature at Bunker Hill Community College and is President and Director of Faraday Publishing.
Melanie Henderson is a Washington, DC native poet, editor, publisher and photographer. She is the author of Elegies for New York Avenue, winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. 
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Dennis James Sweeney is the author of In the Antarctic Circle, winner of the 2020 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and forthcoming in March 2021, as well as four chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Prelude, Poor Claudia, Quarterly West, and Territory, among others. A Small Press Editor of Entropy, he has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Marylou Davis is a specialist in documentation, conservation, design, and replication of decorative paints and gilding on historic architectural surfaces and objects. Davis’ work includes: replications of 19th-century factory made block printed floorcloths installed at the Gardner-Pingree House, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, CT; replicated flame mahogany wood graining at Boscobel Restoration at Garrison, NY, and cedar graining in the George Washington bedchamber at the Joseph Webb House in Wethersfield, CT. Marylou’s’ work has increasingly turned toward project management for restoration projects within historic churches and house museums. At the Emily Dickinson Homestead she has worked with Director Jane Wald in surveying extant physical and written evidence toward the restoration now in progress.
