Musical performance featuring the poems of Emily Dickinson with music and lyrics by Rosemary Caine!
If the Irish can claim they saved civilization, then the Wilde Irish Women dare to claim that Margaret Maher saved Emily Dickinson’s poems. Experience the lauded musical play that reveals the unlikely story of a humble Irish maid’s influence on her reclusive mistress, Emily Dickinson.
Margaret Maher defied Emily’s deathbed decree to burn her poems. Her brave, independent thinking and courageous action came from being born in Ireland, a country where poems are respected, not burned. But there is so much more to the story…
Rosie Caine and the Wilde Irish Women explore this fascinating aspect of Emily’s life in “The Celtification of Emily Dickinson.”

Learn more about the show on Ireland’s national broadcast program Nationwide.

About the Performers

Founded by Rosemary Caine of Ardee, County Louth, Ireland, Wilde Irish Women is a collaborative performance group based in Western Massachusetts. The ensemble comprises musicians, actors and singers who have been together since the early 2000’s. Its mission is to illuminate through original music and story the lives of Irish geniuses of literature and legend — saints and sinners included! The focus is on Irish culture, as well as the forgotten women of Irish history and always delivered with Caine’s signature good humor.

The cast is a constellation of musical and acting talent from the Pioneer Valley and beyond. Wilde Irish Women is proud to be a community centric arts group and is host to some of the Pioneer Valleys great talents including famed Hollywood director Michael Haley, astronaut Cady Coleman, UMass professor Michael Morgan, gifted multi-instrumentalist and fiddle phenom Chris Devine, and a constellation of musical, theatrical and artistic stars from all walks of life. 
wildeirishwomen.com/the-celtification-of-emily-dickinson

 

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!

Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest masters of the short poem. In this workshop for writers at all stages in their practice, we’ll focus on the Very Short Poem, the highly pressurized lyric that casts off a resonance far bigger than its real estate.

Looking at poems by Dickinson, Ross Gay, Jane Kenyon, Bill Knott, Lorine Niedecker, and Martha Rhodes, we’ll explore how a poem can become more focused and intense with strategies of inference, implication, subordination, and exclusion. Our time together will include a generative exercise— please join us to add the VSP to your poetic toolbox!

About the Poet
PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Willow Hammer (Four Way Books, 2025), and Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Donnelly is Program Director of The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature by Columbia University. A former Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly’s poems explore topics like same-sex love and desire and the AIDS epidemic with lyric strategies.

 

Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips and Sebastian Merrill, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with moderator Kirun Kapur.

About the Poets

Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets.
carlphillipspoet.com

Sebastian Merrill is an award winning poet and a yoga instructor. His debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press and was named a 2024 Stonewall Honor Book – Barbara Gittings Literature Award by the American Library Association.
sebastianmerrill.com

 

Nicole Callihan, Pichchenda Bao, and Jennifer Franklin, the editors of Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) will discuss a group of Dickinson’s poems about the body and embodied experience, particularly her exploration into the often-contradictory needs between body and mind. We will also read a selection of contemporary poems by women and non-binary poets from Braving the Body who have been inspired by Dickinson’s work. We will provide prompts for a generative writing exercise inspired by Dickinson and/or the poems from the anthology. There will be time for interested participants to share their drafts and to receive feedback from the editors.

About the Poets

Jennifer Franklin published three poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way 2023). In 2021, Franklin received grants from NYFA/City Artist Corps and Café Royal Cultural Foundation. Her work has been published widely including in APR, Bennington Review, The Nation, and The Paris Review. Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day.” She teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program and HVWC, where she serves as Program Director.
jenniferfranklinpoet.com

Pichchenda Bao is a Cambodian American writer, infant survivor of the Khmer Rouge, daughter of refugees, and feminist stay-at-home mother. Her work speaks to the interwoven nature of grief, resilience, historical and generational trauma, and the everyday. Her work has been published widely and nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her honors include a fellowship from Kundiman, a residency from Bethany Arts, a New Works grant from Queens Council on the Arts.
pichchendabao.com

Nicole Callihan’s most recent book, This Strange Garment (Terrapin, 2023) navigates her stage II bilateral breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Her work has been published in APR, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Chigger Ridge will be published by The Word Works in 2024 and SLIP will be published by Saturnalia in 2025.
https://www.nicolecallihan.com/

 

Just what does a Poet Laureate do? You have questions and we have answers! Two poets from New England will share their poetic work as well as discuss the programs they implemented for their own communities. They will also discuss how they became Poet Laureates, what kinds of opportunities are available through their positions, as well as what sort of pitfalls are present in navigating the role of public poet.

About the Poets
OLIVER DE LA PAZ is the author and editor of several books and serves as the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA. His latest collection of poetry, The Diaspora Sonnets, was published by Liveright Press (2023). It was a winner of the 2023 New England Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. A founding member of Kundiman, he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
oliverdelapaz.com

DIANNELY ANTIGUA is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.
diannelyantigua.com

 

Open mic night hosted by poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua.
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) Featured poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua will follow the open mic. 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-ups for open mic readers have now closed.

About the Poets
Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of several books and serves as the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA. His latest collection of poetry, The Diaspora Sonnets, was published by Liveright Press (2023). It was a winner of the 2023 New England Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. A founding member of Kundiman, he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
oliverdelapaz.com

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title.

 

From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a subject that haunts you. We will be looking at how to write and sustain work within a singular focus, obsession, or motif. This workshop introduces poems and works paired with exercises that allow the writer to be haunted by a subject, inviting writers to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that find themselves, suddenly facing the ghosts that visit them frequently. Ultimately, we will look to lines from Dickinson that declare:

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors Surpassing
Material Place—

About the Poet
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, published by Liveright Press in 2023, is long listed for the National Book Award and is the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves on the board for Poetry Daily and on the board for the Worcester County Poetry Association.
oliverdelapaz.com

 

Like us, Emily Dickinson lived in a time of ecological change and painful civil conflict. Against this backdrop, Dickinson’s poems reach out to the world around her—the frog, the snake, the hummingbird, train, “slant of light,” even the “loaded gun,” addressing these others as companions, fellow witnesses. In this panel, poets Carolina Ebeid, Julia Guez, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Tess Taylor will explore both Dickinson’s and their own dialogues with the nonhuman. The poets will read poems by Dickinson in conversation with each other’s work to plumb that site in which “surpassing/Material Place—” we might instead “Dwell in Possibility.” We follow with writing prompts and conversation.

About the Poets
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet born in New Jersey to Palestinian and Cuban parents. She is the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, the chapbook Dauerwunder, and many digital experiments. She edits poetry at The Rumpus and Visible Binary, and from 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University.
carolinaebeid.com

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, and a translation fellowship from the NEA. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.
juliaguez.net

Anna V. Q. Ross is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Flutter, Kick, which won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry, and was named a 2023 Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library. The recipient of fellowships from Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she teaches creative writing at Tufts University and lives in Boston, where she raises chickens.
annaVQross.com

Tess Taylor’s body of work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Work & Days, and Rift Zone. In 2023, she published the poetry anthology: Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. She lives just outside Berkeley California.
tess-taylor.com

 

Emily Dickinson’s poems interact with silence to open spaces of questioning, recognition, and keen attention to spiritual matters and questions of meaning. In this workshop, we’ll place our own poetry in the context of Dickinson’s poetry, offer a short guided meditation and generative prompts for participants to explore their own relation to silence, voice, and spiritual attention.

About the Poets

Rachel Zucker is the author The Poetics of Wrongness, SoundMachine, MOTHERs and eight other books. In addition to working as a labor doula, childbirth educator, and pearl stringer, Rachel has taught writing to people of all ages and, for the past thirteen years, to graduate and undergraduates at New York University. She is founder and host of the Commonplace podcast and directrix of The Commonplace School for Embodied Poetics.
www.commonplace.today

Nadia Colburn is the author of I Say the Sky and The High Shelf. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, is a yoga teacher, serious student of Thich Nhat Hanh and founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.
nadiacolburn.com/

 

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!

In this workshop, participants will learn how to translate their personal stories of illness and disability into poetry, something Dickinson herself practiced, and something that’s employed by practitioners of Narrative/Poetic Medicine.

The workshop, led by poets whose work centers around medicine and disability (from the perspectives of physician, caregiver, and as patients themselves) will be both reflective and generative and will include the reading and discussion of a medical poem by Dickinson as well as a poem by a contemporary “medical poet.” The workshop will culminate with a generative exercise involving the translation of participants’ medical histories into poetic form.

About the Poets

Catharine Clark-Sayles is a physician who recently retired after forty years in practice. She completed her MFA in poetry and narrative medicine at Dominican University of California in 2019. Her first two books of poetry, One Breath and Lifeboat, were published by Tebot Bach Press. A chapbook, Brats, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her fourth book, The Telling, The Listening, was published by Saint Julian Press in October 2023.
clarksayles.com

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of rinky dink press, and the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates self-care and healing through poetry. She’s published three collections of poetry and was the winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapboo competition. Her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, poets.org, on local NPR affiliates, national NPR podcasts, the TEDx stage, and elsewhere. She teaches at ASU.
rdpoet.com