In honor of Emily Dickinson’s 190th birthday, the Museum collected your stories from around the world. This project sought to document the many Emily Dickinsons that exist in the hearts of contemporary readers. So many of us feel a deep connection to Dickinson’s life, her poetry, or to both. For some, we read her work as young students in school and become curious about the woman who lowered gingerbread from her window; others of do not find Dickinson until we are older and her poetry’s themes of loss and hope begin to resonate profoundly; still others find that Dickinson’s wit and fierce individuality is a touchstone.
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Emily Dickinson is one of the people most important in my life | Karen | Amherst, MA
The strange and wonderful | Maddy | Amherst, MA
I heard some interesting parts of myself come alive | Georgina | Astoria, Queens, NY
Emily Dickinson teaches me what to look for | Brece | Sheffield, MA
My soul sister, my inspiration, my forever companion | Barbara | Katonah, NY
There's a story there | Alessandra
You don't have to ask permission to create | Dana | Cleveland, OH
Our weird encounter with Emily Dickinson | Deborah and Brad | Amherst, MA
One day I found Emily Dickinson in my mailbox | Rosemarie | Phoenix, AZ
Eloquence and elegance | Emilia | Thetford, VT
Here was a kindred spirit who was articulating my own thoughts and feelings | Regina | Austin, TX
Emily Dickinson is a dancer | Emily | Boise, ID
Questioning the greater things about life | Danielle | San Diego, CA
To plant a fig tree in New England takes faith and imagination ... | David | Iowa City, IA
I went to the cemetery and there I communed with her | Robert | Grants Pass, OR
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Lynne Thompson’s most recent collection of poems, Fretwork, was selected by Jane Hirshfield for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and published in 2019. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, Thompson is the author of Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press) and her work has been widely published and anthologized including in New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Best American Poetry 2020, among others. Thompson serves on the Boards of Directors of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Nicole M. Young is a performer, poet, playwright, director, event producer/curator, and nonprofit professional with over 20 years of experience combined in these areas. Nicole has worked across various disciplines, including theatre, poetry, and classical music. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Nicole currently resides in Northern Connecticut and works in Western Massachusetts. 
Amina Jordan Mendez is a queer poet/performer. She works as a teaching artist for the award winning Enchanted Circle Theater of Holyoke, MA, and is a Ford Tubman Healthy Living Organizer. Her work is focused on community engagement through arts and activism. She is the recipient of the 2020 Emerging Writers Fellowship sponsored by the Straw Dog Writers Guild of Western Massachusetts.
Cammy Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, is forthcoming in 2021. All are published by Four Way Books. Her work appeared recently in the anthology, Poems in the Aftermath. Two of her poems under the title Far Past War were set to music by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas. The premiere of this choral work will be performed by the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington DC on Oct. 17, 2021. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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.
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 Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among other places. Her essays have recently appeared in Lit Hub, Guernica, Boston Review, and PN Review. She is the poetry editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books’ Quarterly Journal.
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.
Danielle Legros Georges is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. She is a professor in and director of the Lesley University MFA program in Creative Writing, and taught in the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences Writer’s Workshop, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. She was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019, and collaborating with literary and visual artists, museums and galleries. The Massachusetts Artists Leaders Coalition recognized her civic work with a Champion of Artists Award in 2017. She is the editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems. Her most recent work is a book of translations from the French, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, published by Subpress Collective in 2021.
Philip F. Clark is the author of The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), and teaches at City College, New York, where he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2016. He is a Poetry Editor at The Night Heron Barks, A&U Magazine, and The Poet’s Grin. His poetry and writing has been published in Tiferet Journal (nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize), Vox Populi, Re: An Ideas Journal, Lambda Literary and other publications. 
Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Said Not Said (Graywolf Press, 2017). Graywolf also published his collections Full Moon Boat (2000) and The Looking House (2009). His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize from the Word Works. In 2002 Dedalus Press of Dublin Ireland brought out House on Water, House in Air, a new and selected poems. 
Mervyn Taylor a Trinidad-born poet and longtime Brooklyn resident, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including No Back Door (2010), Voices Carry (2017), and most recently, Country of Warm Snow (2020), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which has also been long listed for the Bocas Prize. His chapbook, News of the Living: Corona Poems was published by Broadstone Books in 2020. Currently, he serves as co-editor on the Advisory Board of Slapering Hol Press, Hudson Valley, New York.