To register for this free program and receive the link, click here.

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday.

In June we feature poems from Poetry In The Pandemic, a crowd-sourced poetry project organized by Haoran Tong. The reading will feature staff, students, and faculty of Amherst College, and will last approximately 40 minutes. This program is dedicated to graduating seniors everywhere, but especially to the Museum’s two graduating student employees, Anna Plummer and Jane Bragdon.

This month’s readers are:

Eliza Brewer: Eliza is a poet and essayist from Houston, Texas studying English and Philosophy at Amherst. Her work has appeared in Circus, Outrageous Fortune, Polaris, The Allegheny Review, and Glass Mountain. She is a big sister to four siblings who are her inspiration and purpose.

Kalidas Shanti: Kalidas ‘22 is a poet majoring English and Math. He is currently engaged in a couple personal writing projects. The first is a collection of poems written in response to being in quarantine. All of the poems are written in iMessage to his partner as a way of maintaining intimacy while being in a long-distance relationship. The other is an expansion of a past project.

Brenna Macaray: Brenna ‘21 is an artist and poet currently majoring in English at Amherst College. She works as the Design Librarian for the Thester and Dance Dept., and at the Emily Dickinson Museum since 2018 as a museum assistant and tour guide, an opportunity for which she is ever grateful. She’s also currently working on her creative thesis in poetry, a lyric essay revolving in part around Dickinson.

Kiera Alventosa: Kiera ‘21 is a poet and writer from Long Island, New York, studying English and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. She is the Editor in Chief of The Indicator magazine and her work has also appeared in Circus. She is a recipient of the 2020 Academy of American Poets prize. She strives to write about nature with an environmental activism and justice perspective.

Anna Plummer: Anna has just graduated from Amherst College, where she majored in English and Theater & Dance. In a world with 32 hour days, she would have majored in History, too. She is a proud member of the Emily Dickinson Museum community, where she has worked as tour guide and museum assistant for five years. Anna has also studied literature and poetry writing in Bath, England. 

Haoran Tong: (see below)

About the project:

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, socialize, and communicate with nature. Ever since the outbreak, stay-at-home measures have been imposed to protect the vulnerable community for the sake of public health. Faces are masked, interactions are distanced, routines are interrupted. In the process of containing the virus, hope emerges from the darkness as the curves flatten, thanks to the heroic essential workers and generous community members. However, many people also suffer from shocking news, lost lives, and fractured families. 

Amidst uncertainty and anxiety, poetry brings us hope, inspiration, and reflection. If the consoling and unifying power of poetry is forgotten in ordinary times, it is becoming ever more influential and desirable in trying times. On Instagram, reading a poem per day has become a cure for boredom and loneliness. When we read and write poetry, we do so to understand and connect with each other. Poetry reminds us of our inner qualities of empathy, unity, and freedom. 

To encourage the members of the Amherst community to lead a poetic life and overcome the difficult circumstances, Haoran Tong ‘23 creates a platform of poetry reading and writing. Alumni, faculty, staff, students, and families of Amherst College share their thoughts and expressions with others by submitting poems they have read or written during the pandemic. They may also provide a brief explanation of how they resonate with the poems in the context of the pandemic.”

About Haoran Tong:

Haoran Tong ’23, the organizer of the “Poetry in the Pandemic” project, is a first-year student at Amherst College, MA. His poetic journey started at the age of 4 in Beijing, China, where he was born and bred. He enjoys the works of Emily Dickinson, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Adunis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Xi Chuan. He was awarded the Youth Poet Laureate of China in 2017. As a member of the Poets Unite Worldwide Association, he wants to promote intercultural exchange by exploring the possibilities of poetic form and expression. Besides poetry, he is a lover of choral singing, physics, and comparative legal studies.

This program has been cancelled due to the pandemic. You might be interested in this remote program with master gardener and author Marta McDowell. 

Celebrate the beauty of spring during Garden Days at the Emily Dickinson Museum! 

As warmer temperatures arrive in Amherst, Emily’s garden begs to be tended. Join our 2018 Gardener-in-Residence Marta McDowell and a group of volunteers to aid in the cultivation and growth of the historic Dickinson family landscape. You do not need to be an expert gardener for this “all levels” program. Learn from volunteers who have tended the gardens in the past and become part of a new generation of caretakers for this precious piece of land. During Garden Days, visitors to the Museum can tend the historic landscape, discuss nature poetry under the great white oak tree, learn about the ongoing archaeological work, and enjoy gatherings in the garden all weekend long.

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday.

This program is free to attend. Registration is required, click here to receive the link.

In July we feature three Pioneer Valley poets:

Michael Mercurio lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he is also a member of the steering committee for the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival (formerly Amherst Poetry Festival.) Michael’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Sugar House Review, Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, and Indianapolis Review, and his criticism has been published by The Lily Poetry Review. Find him online at poetmercurio.com.

Hannah Larrabee‘s collection, Wonder Tissue, won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and is in the running for a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award. She has a new chapbook of epistolary poems to Teilhard de Chardin out from Nixes Mate Press. Hannah’s written poetry for the James Webb Space Telescope program at NASA, and she’ll be sailing around Svalbard in the arctic circle with artists and scientists later this fall. She has an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she studied with Charles Simic. For more information visit www.hannahlarrabee.com

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers.  His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, and The Critical Flame.  He teaches at Hampshire College. For more information visit www.nathanmcclain.com.

William Shakespeare was Emily Dickinson’s favorite writer, and her letters abound with references to him and his works. Dickinson’s allusions to Shakespeare’s writings evidence his pervasive presence in her life but also signal his ubiquitous place in her culture. In collaboration with the Emily Dickinson Museum, the 2020 EDIS Annual Meeting will be held July 31 to August 1 in Amherst, Massachusetts. This year’s focus is Dickinson’s great love of Shakespeare, and this theme will shape the features of this annual meeting, including the reading groups, tours of the Dickinson Museum, performances, readings, seminar-style discussions, and talks.

Tidying the gardens at the Homestead

This program has been cancelled due to the pandemic. You may be interested in this remote program with master gardener and author Marta McDowell.

Celebrate the beauty of summer during Garden Days at the Emily Dickinson Museum! As summer temperatures descend upon Amherst, Emily’s garden begs to be tended. Join our 2018 Gardener-in-Residence Marta McDowell and a group of volunteers to aid in the cultivation and growth of the historic Dickinson family landscape. You do not need to be an expert gardener for this “all levels” program. Learn from volunteers who have tended the gardens in the past and become part of a new generation of caretakers for this precious piece of land. During Garden Days, visitors to the Museum can tend the historic landscape, discuss nature poetry under the great white oak tree, learn about the ongoing archaeological work, and enjoy gatherings in the garden all weekend long.

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday.

This program is free to attend. Registration is required. To sign-up and receive the link, click here.

In August, our feature poets are:

Rebecca Hart Olander: Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Crab Creek Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Collaborative work made with Elizabeth Paul has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press). Rebecca is a Women’s National Book Association poetry contest winner and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook, Dressing the Wounds, was published by dancing girl press in 2019, and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2021. Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and is editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her at rebeccahartolander.com and @rholanderpoet.

Photo credit Jen Fitzgerald

Leah Umansky: Leah Umansky is the author of two full length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), and Domestic Uncertainties (2013), among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, Guernica, Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Poetry International, Thrush Poetry Journal, Rhino, and Pleiades. She is resisting the tyrant with her every move. She is #teamstark  #teamelliot & #teambernard and can be found at www.leahumansky.com. Twitter: @lady_Bronte. Instagram: @leah.umansky 

Omotara James: Omotara James is the author of the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. A former social worker in the field of Harm Reduction. She has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. She is a recipient of the 2019 92Y / Discovery Poetry Prize and the winner of the 2019 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Poetry. In addition, her work has been recognized with the Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Prize, two Pushcart Prize nominations and one Best of the Net nomination. Her work was selected for the 2020 Best Small Fictions Anthology and she was a 2019 finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY magazine, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets, Platypus Press,The Believer, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America, Nat.Brut, No Tokens and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and lives in NYC.  Learn more at omotarajames.com or find her on Twitter and Instagram @omotarajames.