Thank You For The Surgery”_- Tell It Slant 2025

Thank You For The Surgery
The Poet-Editor Relationship
Saturday, September 20, 3:30pm ET

HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum AND streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Thank You For The Surgery”_- Tell It Slant 2025Callie Siskel and Elizabeth Metzger, poetry co-editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and poet Dorothea Lasky, will use the Higginson-Dickinson correspondence to consider the role of the poet as editor or editor as poet today and rethink our assumptions about the editor. Beyond the aim of publishing our work as poets, how might we see the conversation between poet and editor today as expanding possible pathways of creativity? We often think about the relationship between poet and reader, but the special role of the poet-editor offers an intermediary process that has the opportunity to transform, elevate, or pressurize our solitary artistic visions–sometimes by offering concrete feedback, sometimes by asking us to formulate our aesthetic vision or reconsider our projects and values, and other times simply by creating space in our society for a larger conversation around poetry, life, and listening. In a poetry world in which many editors are poets themselves, and a main avenue for becoming a poet is the workshop classroom, how might the editor-poet relationship create a correspondence that is at once formative, supportive, and expansive, and a relationship that is personally and professionally meaningful and ideally non-hierarchical?
 
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of PROMPT. She lives in California.

Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, and Arctic Revival, selected by Elizabeth Alexander for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry appears in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and a PhD in Creative and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review Books.

 
Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e))
 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Open Me Carefully- Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

Open Me Carefully
Dickinson’s Legacy of Correspondence
Saturday, September 20, 1pm ET

HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum AND streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Open Me Carefully- Tell It Slant 2025 graphicEmily Dickinson is known to have written more than a thousand intimate and poetic letters in her lifetime. What fueled these correspondences, and how did these correspondences fuel Dickinson’s creative mind? In this workshop, poets Nicole Callihan, Tina Cane, Caitlin Grace McDonnell, and Zoë Ryder White will discuss the necessity and ascendancy of correspondence in their own lives and work. Panelists will consider poetry’s deep intersection of private world and public sphere, and then ask participants to do the same as they pen their own letter-poems. This generative writing—if Nerve not be denied!—will be shared.
 
Caitlin Grace McDonnell, a former New York Times Foundation and Fine Arts Work Center fellow, has published two books (Looking for Small Animals 2012 and Pandemic City 2021, both from Nauset Press) and a chapbook (Dreaming the Tree 2003 from belladonna). Her poems and essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Braving the Body (2024) and Poetry is Bread (upcoming). She teaches writing and lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.

Nicole Callihan, winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize and a 2023 Alma Award, has two recent poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), as well as the chapbooks Downtown, A Study in Spring, and ELSEWHERE (the latter two in collaboration with Zoë Ryder White). Nicole also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024.

 
Tina Cane is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (2016-2024). A 2020 fellow with the Academy of American Poets, Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, and Year of the Murder Hornet. Creator/curator of the distance series Poetry is Bread, and editor of Poetry is Bread: The Anthology, Cane has also published two verse novels for younger readers, Alma Presses Play and Are You Nobody Too? (Penguin/ Random House).
 
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her first full-length collection, The Visible Field, is forthcoming from River River Books in early 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring and Elsewhere with Nicole Callihan. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Open Mic - Tell It Slant 2025

Open Mic Night
With Music from Los Lorcas
Friday, Sept. 19, 7pm ET

HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum and streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

Open Mic - Tell It Slant 2025

Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 5 minutes each to make us feel “physically as if the top of [our] head[s] were taken off!” (Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 16 August 1870). Open mic sign-ups are handled in advance via a Google Form, and selected readers will be notified. All readers must be available to read in-person and must register for the Festival to be considered. 

Sign up for the open mic here by September 3!

About Los Lorcas
One of the most versatile and adventurous bard bands touring today, Los Lorcas are making ground-breaking inroads where most poets and musicians fear to tread, conjuring rich lyrical and sonic tapestries that defy predictable niches while celebrating “the music of what happens.” In the spirit of Federico Garcia Lorca—gifted musician, legendary poet/playwright and ebullient performer—poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, fuse poetry and music in a passionate and surprising mash-up. Los Lorcas blur boundaries between spoken word and song, weaving poetry with Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana and jazz in pursuit of the cante jondo (deep song) Lorca ardently championed.


 

Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 

 

 

Food & Free Verse
A Celebration of Food Through Poetry
Thursday, September 18, 3pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Food & Free Verse_ - Tell It Slant 2025This is a unique poetry generative writing workshop for writers of all levels. We will meditate on different ways to perceive the way food nourishes the soul, just like a poem does: through memory and survival, through gratitude, through synesthesia, through love languages and through socio-economic commentary. Join us and leave with at least one solid poem draft!
 
Vasvi Kejriwal is a former lawyer from India. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and has been a Finalist for the Yellowwood Poetry Prize and the Epiphany Breakout Prize. She is the recipient of the AI Young Memorial Scholarship from the Community of Writers Conference. Vasvi’s poems appear / are forthcoming in Rattle, Four Way Review, Nimrod, wildness, and elsewhere. She is a MFA candidate at NYU. She loves discovering the names of flowers she’s crossing paths with for the first time.

Saranya Subramanian completed her MFA at the University of San Francisco. Her writing has been published in The Caravan, Aainanagar, Outlook, Vayavya, The Bombay Review––among others. Her essay, “The Cockroach and I”, was published by Penguin Random House and won runner up to the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. She runs The Bombay Poetry Crawl (which has been featured in the New York Times), an archival space dedicated to 20th century Bombay Poets.

 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
The Interior and the Other_ - Tell It Slant 2025

The Interior and the Other
on poetic and psychic transformation
Wednesday, September 17, 7:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


The Interior and the Other_ - Tell It Slant 2025What can poetry teach us about psychoanalysis, and the process of sharing one’s inner self with another? What can therapeutic or healing work teach us about writing poems? In this panel, two poets who have written about and undergone forms of therapy will explore the art and practice of writing about interiority and healing. We will read Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, and each presenter’s work, and explore the intersections between them.
 
Ayelet Amittay is the author of The Eating Knife (Fernwood Press 2025). Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and others. She is a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Oregon.

Dana Levin is the author of five books poetry. Her latest is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon), a 2022 New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” She is a grateful recipient of honors from the NEA, PEN, the Library of Congress, and the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin teaches for the Bennington Writing Seminars and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.

 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
From Blank to Blank - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

From Blank to Blank
How and Why to Use Blackout Poetry
Wednesday, September 17, 4:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


From Blank to Blank - Tell It Slant 2025 graphicWhat do acts of erasure afford a writer? How can blackout poetry be used to create community, unlock writer’s block, or clap back? The reasons for engaging in an erasure of a text can range from playful engagements with the literary canon, to political reclamations of voice and language. In this interactive workshop, we’ll be looking closely at resonant models of erasure (including Nicole Sealey, Sarah Sloat, Tracy K. Smith, and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth), and exploring the effects of different blackout poetry strategies. Participants will leave the workshop with prompts, tools of erasure, and recommended readings. Featuring Matt Donovan and Jenny George, authors of We Are Not Where We Are: an erasing of Thoreau’s Walden (Bull City Press, 2025).
 
Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks, including, most recently, The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA) and Missing Department (Visual Studies Workshop), a collection of poetry and art made in collaboration with the artist Ligia Bouton. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason and After Image, both from Copper Canyon Press, as well as the chapbook * (Bull City Press). She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Letters to the World - Tell It Slant 2025

Letters to the World
Epistolary Creativity Workshop
Wednesday, September 17, 2:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Letters to the World - Tell It Slant 2025Follow Emily Dickinson’s example by writing letters “to the World” in a virtual workshop with epistolary fantasy author Sylvie Cathrall. In this gentle and good-humored writing program, participants will play with letter-writing as a form of poetic and personal expression while drawing inspiration from Dickinson’s own letters. Guided freewriting sessions will be followed by opportunities for sharing and reflection. No experience necessary – open to all writers (and sometimes-writers, first-time-writers, letter-writers, and everyone else, too!). 
 
Sylvie Cathrall is the author of the Sunken Archive duology. Her first novel, A Letter to the Luminous Deep, was an Indies Introduce debut pick and one of Library Journal’s best books of 2024. She lives in Wales with her spouse (formerly her pen pal) and their child (currently an inquisitive toddler).
 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Putting the Wit in Witness - Tell It Slant 2025

Putting the Wit in Witness
Bringing Levity to Heavy Topics
Tuesday, September 16, 6:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Putting the Wit in Witness - Tell It Slant 2025In Dickinson, we meet a speaker who sees Death as a kindly chauffeur and notes the flies buzzing around their deathbed. In these and other remarkable poems, Dickinson upends the heaviness of confronting our own mortality. She situates the speaker as a witness whose playfulness, wit, and sarcasm defuses the volatility of the moment – and helps renew the reader’s perspective. In this generative workshop, we turn to Dickinson and other contemporary poets who use a light hand to address tough subjects. Through readings and interactive writing exercises, participants will explore the power of this approach to inspire their own writing.
 
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press). Her chapbook, Hesitation Waltz, is forthcoming from the Midwest Writing Center. She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
 
Jung Hae Chae is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays, POJANGMACHA PEOPLE, winner of the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, among others. Chae’s writing can be found in AGNI, Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), the 2019 Pushcart Prize anthology, and the Best American Essays 2022.
 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
The Beauty of Objectivity - Tell It Slant 2025

The Beauty of Objectivity
Tuesday, September 16, 3:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


The Beauty of Objectivity - Tell It Slant 2025This workshop provides beginning poets with a framework for analyzing poetry with an objective approach centered on craft elements. With an eye toward formalism, this workshop centers on a streamlined infographic to help writers objectively analyze and discuss any poem — from ancient to contemporary — at the level of craft and technique. Participants will analyze Dickinson’s poems and contemporary examples, and they will generate and analyze their own poetry in response to Dickinson-centered prompts. The key focus of this workshop is for writers to view any poem objectively and ask not: “Is this poem good or bad?” but “What is this poem doing?”.
 
Mary Robles is from El Paso, Texas. She is a current MFA candidate in poetry at Bowling Green State University and Poetry Editor at Mid-American Review. Her work recently appeared in The Adroit Journal and AGNI’s “To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing,” and she has poems forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review and Copper Nickel, among others.
 
Lucas Clark is from a small farming community in Northeast Ohio. His poetry is mostly concerned with meditating in the experience of nature and relishing the love of close friendships. You can probably find him out in the woods walking, rain or shine.
 
 


Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Festival 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 this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 

Press Release:
A Something Overtakes the Mind

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Patrick Fecher
publicrelations@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

A Something Overtakes the Mind — a multimedia visual art and poetry installation created by artists Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan for the Emily Dickinson Museum — takes a cue from the words of Emily Dickinson and, through explorations of domestic objects, biographical details, found poetry, and community testimonials, seeks to find new ways of engaging with the poet’s life and legacy. 

The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025 through December 21, 2025.

Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of wrapping paper, “Did you ever read one of her Poems backward because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—A something overtakes the Mind.”

On August 1st, the Emily Dickinson Museum will open an art installation featuring the work of visual artist Ligia Bouton and poet Matt Donovan. The installation will be on view on the ground floor of the Homestead in spaces that historically served the Dickinson family as their laundry room, kitchen, and dining room. Following the exhibition the Museum will prepare this part of the historic house for the third and final phase of Homestead restoration. 

In addition to other objects from the Museum collection, the installation is anchored by two significant sets of Dickinson family objects: wallpaper fragments from the poet’s bedroom and pieces of unassembled quilts. Visitors will encounter laser-cut forms echoing the delicate contours of the wallpaper scraps, filled with curated texts spanning centuries, including biographical insights and interpretations of Dickinson’s signature “em” dash, poetically mirrored in the wallpaper’s design.

In the kitchen space, quilt fragments will be paired with shadowboxes and vitrines containing domestic objects from the Museum’s collection.  Paper scraps remaining on the quilt pieces showcase legible text, forming the basis for artistic language collages and found-word poetry.

A final feature will invite audience interaction through a hands-on poetry-making station using words from the papers enclosed in quilt fragments, alongside a video installation featuring community members reading Dickinson’s poetry and reflecting on her enduring legacy.

Artists Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan state,As an artist and poet collaborative team, we’re always looking for ways to explore intersections of text, image, and objects, and the idea of working with the Emily Dickinson Museum seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to delve into a life and body of work that we already found fascinating, especially given that we drive past the poet’s home nearly every day. As we’ve developed the video component of our project–a short film titled “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” that is comprised of community interviews–it’s been really wonderful to speak with so many folks in Amherst and to hear about their own connections to Dickinson’s life and work, and the extent to which her poetry remains a source of ongoing fascination, solace, and inspiration.”

Megan Ramsey, Collections Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum says, “The Museum’s collection had remained largely undocumented and inaccessible up until 2023 when we completed a three-year cataloguing project and published our first online database. It’s thrilling to see that the publication of the collections database directly led to new interpretations of Dickinson’s material life in the form of this exhibition from Bouton and Donovan.”

The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025. Visitors should check in first at the Carriage House. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, August 8, 2025 from 5-7pm ET. 

Learn more about A Something Overtakes the Mind:
https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/a-something-overtakes-the-mind/

For press-approved images:
https://bit.ly/Photos-ASOTM-EDM

ABOUT THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM

The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to sparking the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home.

The Museum comprises two historic houses—the Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens—in the center of Amherst, Mass. that were home to the poet (1830-1886) and members of her immediate family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum was created in 2003 when the two houses merged under the ownership of the Trustees of Amherst College. The Museum is overseen by a separate Board of Governors and is responsible for raising its own operating, program, and capital funds.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and currently divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico in the US.  Her creative work combines sculpture and photography with performance and digital video to recreate appropriated narratives and research drawn from the history of science, literature, and other sources.  Bouton’s recent projects have been shown at museums such as the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.  In 2016, Bouton’s work was featured in the exhibition, “Charlotte Great and Small,” celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England.  Bouton’s video work has been shown at Art Claims Impulse in Berlin, in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nimes, France, and at the Temporary Art Center, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as well as in The Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague.  Reviews of this work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times.  She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant for the opera “Inheritance” which premiered at University of California, San Diego in 2018 and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her project “25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”.  Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Bouton is currently Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks: We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Walden, co-authored with Jenny George, Bull City Press 2025), The Dug-Up Gun Museum (a collection of poems about guns and gun violence in America, BOA 2022), Missing Department (a collaborative collection of art and poetry created with artist Ligia Bouton, Visual Studies Workshop 2023), A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (a book of lyric essays, Trinity University Press 2016), Rapture & the Big Bam (selected by Lia Purpura for the Snowbound Chapbook Competition, Tupelo Press 2016), and Vellum (selected by Mark Doty for the Bakeless Contest, Houghton Mifflin 2007). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.