Join us for a lively virtual discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters, meeting once a month from March to June. This program is designed to welcome newcomers and seasoned readers of Dickinson alike.
Each session is facilitated by a guest scholar with unique expertise, who leads the group in discussion following an introductory talk. Brief reading handouts will be distributed prior to each month’s program.
Topics and Leaders:
- March: Possession and Dispossession: Jewels in Dickinson’s Poetry with Kylan Rice
Examining Dickinson’s treatment of gemstones, with respect to her attitudes toward race and class privilege
- April: “Because I could not stop:” Courting Death in Apple TV’s Dickinson with Marianne Noble
Revisiting the poetry and plot of Apple TV+ first episode of Dickinson, with a focus on the oft-anthologized “Because I could not stop for Death”
- May: “Sphere of simple Green -” with Renée Bergland
A discussion on Dickinson and natural science, drawing from her recent book, Natural Magic
- June: “A formal feeling comes -“: Defining Nameless Feelings with Eliza Richards
A look at poems that explore feelings with no precise definition in English, such as “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”
Format
As a registrant, you are signing up to join a small group of 25 or fewer regular participants for four 90-minute Zoom sessions. Meetings are participatory, with video and audio encouraged. Because we want everyone to feel comfortable speaking, full sessions will not be recorded. The program is designed for adult audiences (18+).
Registration
We are offering an identical program for Wednesday and Friday groups. Please review the dates carefully — space is limited.
Refunds are not available for this program.
Wednesday Group, $100 program fee (inclusive of all sessions), limited to 25 participants: SOLD OUT
March 19, 6-7:30pm ET
April 23, 6-7:30pm ET
May 14, 6-7:30pm ET
June 11 6-7:30pm ET
Friday Group, $100 program fee (inclusive of all sessions), limited to 25 participants: SOLD OUT
March 21, 12-1:30pm ET
April 25, 12-1:30pm ET
May 16, 12-1:30pm ET
June, 13 12-1:30pm ET
For Educators:
Educators may request a certificate attesting to your participation in the program.
Reservations are made on a first-come, first-served basis.
Questions: Don’t hesitate to reach out to edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org with any questions about the program.
MARCH
Kylan Rice, PhD, is a scholar of nineteenth-century American poetry. His work on the subject has appeared in ELH, Arizona Quarterly, CR: The New Centennial Review, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and Women’s Studies. He is the author of An Image Not a Book, a collection of poetry, and his creative writing has been published in numerous literary journals, including Colorado Review, Image, and West Branch.
APRIL
Marianne Noble’s teaching and research interests include American literature, intimacy and the emotions, and philosophical approaches to literature. She is the author of Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (Cambridge UP 2019) and The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton UP 2000), which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award. She co-edited Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge UP 2013). Recently, she has published articles on Dickinson, Hawthorne, phenomenology, and human contact. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea.
MAY
Renée Bergland is a literary critic and a historian of science who teaches in the Department of Humanities at Simmons University where she is Program Director of Literature and Writing. Her most recent publication is Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton University Press, 2024). She contributed an essay, “Dickinson Emergent: Natural Philosophy and the Postdisciplinary Manifold”, to the Oxford Handbook to Emily Dickinson (2022). Bergland is writing a forthcoming general audience book examining Dickinson’s poetry as interpreted through the lens of different sciences, including astronomy, geology, and ecology. She is a member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society.
JUNE
Eliza Richards is the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she teaches American literature with a specialization in American poetry before 1900. She is especially interested in the way historical events and changes in media networks shape and inform the way that people write poetry, as well as the ways poetry participates in cultural transformations. Her work broadens understanding and awareness of important nineteenth-century poetry written by women, African Americans, and popular writers. Her books include Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the US Civil War (U of Pennsylvania P, 2019) and Emily Dickinson in Context (edited collection; Cambridge UP, 2013), and she is currently working on The Collected Works of George Moses Horton: A Critical Edition.
IN-PERSON PROGRAM
(Wednesday, September 13, 2023, AMHERST, MA) – Today the Emily Dickinson Museum announces the premiere of its online collection database. The Museum’s collection had remained largely undocumented and inaccessible until a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2019 funded the documentation and baseline cataloging of the entire collection for the very first time. This project has improved collection care, providedpublic access to the collection, will strengthen the museum’s interpretation, and open promising new research opportunities.
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.
The Museum’s general audience tours are led by knowledgeable guides who introduce Dickinson’s journey as a poet, with an emphasis on sharing her poems and letters.
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.