This Earthen Door Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey
Between the Dashes #1 – An Emily Dickinson Museum Blog • June 3, 2026
On Friday, May 29, the Emily Dickinson Museum hosted a special Amherst College Reunion program, “This Earthen Door: An Anthotype Homage to Emily Dickinson.” The one-hour illustrated lecture featured contemporary artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey presenting their collaborative project and book, which blends historical archives, plant-based photography, and ecological activism.
Introduced by Jane Wald, the Museum’s Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director, and Museum Trustee Christopher Bogan (’76), the event highlighted how historical archives can serve as living resources to navigate modern environmental challenges.
“For much of my 24 years with the Museum, my work has been centered on the physical and cultural contexts of Emily Dickinson’s life—what we call her ‘material world,'” said Wald during her opening remarks. “We spend our days preserving the architecture of her home and the soil of her gardens, but our ultimate goal is to see that history spark new imagination.”
Reanimating History Through Anthotypes
Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey
Red Daylily, Emily at 14 – negative
(from silhouette of Dickinson cut by Charles Temple 1845)
This Earthen Door is an eco-feminist collaboration that reanimates Emily Dickinson’s herbarium for the 21st century. Marchand and Sobsey remade Dickinson’s original herbarium pages using anthotypes, a plant-based photographic process developed during the poet’s era.
The artists extracted pigments from plants they grew and harvested by hand—the exact species that Dickinson herself cultivated or collected in the nearby woods and meadows of Amherst, Massachusetts. The project involved intensive studio practice and collaborative research with botanists.
By focusing on this intersection of art and science, This Earthen Door underscores the enduring relevance of archives while shedding light on the historically overlooked scientific and artistic contributions of women. The artists remind us that historical archives are not static. Instead, they are living resources that can help us navigate our shared ecological future.
Reflecting on Dickinson’s poem, “New feet within my garden go — / New fingers stir the sod —” (FR 79), Wald noted that Marchand and Sobsey’s work represents a perfect modern realization of those “new fingers” interacting with Dickinson’s legacy.
In a time marked by widespread climate anxiety and ecological instability, the artists’ work asks a vital question: How can a renewed, tactile attention to plants reshape our understanding of the present moment—and our shared futures?
Jane Wald, Emily Dickinson Museum Keiter Family Executive Director
Chris Bogan, Emily Dickinson Museum Board Member
Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, artists
About the Artists
Leah Sobsey is an award-winning artist and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of science, design, and installation. Specializing in plant-based printing techniques, her experimental photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies. Learn more at leahsobsey.com.
Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, New York-based photographer, educator, and writer whose practice explores the environment, landscape, and experimental, plant-based photographic processes. She uses an experimental approach to photography to investigate the natural world and our changing climate. Learn more at amandamarchand.com.
Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023) and two poetry collections, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Washington and is an associate professor at Western Washington University. Her work appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, POETRY, and McSweeney’s. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has received numerous fellowships and exhibits interdisciplinary art nationally.
Anastacia-Reneé (she/they) is a queer writer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023 and an American Library Association Notable Book of 2024, along with (v.), Forget It, and Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere. A former Seattle Civic Poet, TEDx speaker, and radio host, she has received the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award and fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, and Ragdale.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of the forthcoming poetry book, NIGHT OWL (Mar. 2026), and two illustrated collections of essays, BITE BY BITE and WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She also wrote four previous award-winning poetry collections: OCEANIC, LUCKY FISH, AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO, and MIRACLE FRUIT. With the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. 
Amy Wright co-edited the Virginia volume of the Southern Poetry Anthology and is finalizing her fourth volume of poetry. She has also authored six chapbooks and a book of nonfiction, Paper Concert (Sarabande Books), which received a Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose. Her work has also been recognized with two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the author of the full-length collection Girl in a Bear Suit (Elixir Press, 2024) and the e-chapbook Disambiguation (Salamander/Suffolk University, 2024). She’s the winner of the Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Recent work has appeared in or is coming soon from swamp pink, Villain Era, The Common, & On the Seawall. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and serves as the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She is assistant director of the Jacobson Center for Writing at Smith College, and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
Okwudili Nebeolisa is the author of Terminal Maladies (Autumn House Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently studying fiction at the University of Minnesota. His work appears in POETRY, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review, among others. He has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Granum Foundation.
Annie Wenstrup is Dena’ina poet and the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). Awarded the 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, the tenth annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and the Alaska Literary Award in 2023, Wenstrup is an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow. She lives on the traditional territories of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Esther Lin is an undocumented poet and the author of “Cold Thief Place” (Alice James Books, 2025), long-listed for the National Book Award, and “The Ghost Wife” (Poetry Society of America, 2018). A co-organizer of Undocupoets, Lin’s work has been supported by Cité Internationale, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Stanford University, the Poetry Society of America, among others. She lives in Seattle.
Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He is the author of OSSIA, a winner of The Changes Book Prize judged by Louise Glück. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, LitHub, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina’s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
Oak Morse lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MLIS from the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the recipient of the 2025 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Award and the 2024 A Public Space Writing Fellowship. Oak has received support from PEN America and fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Twelve Literary Arts, Cave Canem’s Starshine, and Clay, as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. His work appears in POETRY, Callaloo, Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Hobart, with work forthcoming in Rattle, among others.