I had some things that I called mine –
F101
A Timely Invitation to Support our Collections Work
What does it mean to discover a long-forgotten box filled with dozens of two-inch squares of delicate silk in surprisingly bold colors and patterns?
And what does it mean to recognize that some of those patterns are identical to items of Dickinson family clothing recently cleaned, tagged, and catalogued?
What does it mean to realize that each tiny square of silk is stitched to equally small pieces of paper? And then to notice that the bits of paper include tantalizing handwriting? Whose handwriting?
What can these pieces of material, attached to bits of envelopes, receipts, and invitations tell us about fine handwork, thrift, creativity and manufacturing? About the “slant of light” in the room where the stitcher – or stitchers – started, but never finished the quilt?
Welcome to collections management at the Emily Dickinson Museum.
With support from a federal grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Emily Dickinson Museum is working to preserve, catalog, and digitize records related to its collection and to locate Dickinson-related materials at other institutions. Museum staff and Amherst College interns digitized institutional records, including historic structures reports, catalog cards from the 1980s, and old photos of objects that had remained in place since the early 20th century, and added relevant information from these records into our publicly accessible collections database. Museum staff also conducted surveys of Dickinson material at other institutions, including Amherst College Library, Jones Library, Mount Holyoke College, Harvard University, Brown University, and Yale University, in order to gather information on the extent of primary sources related to EDM collections objects.
“This project has resulted in a better understanding of the Museum’s collections objects, enabling the Museum to interpret the poet’s life and times more fully, and provide public and scholarly access to an important cultural collection.” – Megan Ramsey, Collections Manager
For example, this image of Susan Dickinson, sister-in-law to Emily Dickinson and resident of The Evergreens, is held in the collection of Houghton Library at Harvard University. The image was taken in a photography studio in Germany during one of Susan’s trips to Europe with her daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, circa 1910. The articles of clothing and accessories worn by Susan in this photo are all represented in the Museum’s collection, some of which can be accessed here:
Ensemble dress: 2023.3.260a-b: Database record
Hat: 2023.6.178: Database record
Eyeglasses: 2021.7.458: Database record
By linking the Houghton Library photo and the circumstances of its creation with the physical objects in our collection, we now understand the larger context of these objects in terms of the associated person, her interests and activities, and the timeline of her life. Archival materials are the key to unlocking new interpretations within the world of Emily Dickinson. As we explore the objects in our collection, we find ourselves asking questions such as:
How might a handwritten recipe inform plans to restore the north wing of the Homestead, which housed the kitchen, dining room, pantry and domestic labor living spaces?
What can the birth, and death, of a beloved child help us to understand about the choice of decor in The Evergreens?
What insights can middle-school teachers and students gain about the Civil War by working with museum educators to look closely at a children’s toy from the era?
These are just some of the questions that our ongoing collections work will answer.
How You Can Help
On April 9, 2025, the Museum received notice that our federal IMLS grant supporting this project had been terminated. We invite you to help us cover the gap in funding so we can complete the project in full and on schedule by the end of 2025. By supporting our Collections Project you will be supporting all of the work essential to our mission.
“Our work to amplify Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice – by opening her family homes to visitors, by interpretive and educational use of her family’s material legacy, by holding up her enduring poetry – continues with your support and our unending gratitude.” – Jane Wald, Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director
To learn more about this timely initiative, please contact Senior Director of Development Erin Martin: erimartin@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
Thursday, April 17, 6pm ET
Thursday, May 15, 6pm ET
Thursday, July 17, 6pm ET
Thursday, August 21, 6pm ET
Thursday, September 18, 6pm ET
Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Day is the 2024 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at NC State.
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide including Amherst College. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow in Writing.
Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released from Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
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.
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor-in-chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.
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.
A Daisy for Dickinson: