Private tour with Museum Executive Director Jane Wald
Space is limited — registration required.
Tickets TBA!
During this once-in-a-lifetime program, witness the discoveries emerging within the walls of Emily Dickinson’s 1813 home as the Museum enters the final phase of Homestead restoration. Executive Director Jane Wald leads a private tour of the architectural and forensic investigations illuminating the original condition of the Homestead’s service wing during the poet’s writing years. Guests will see discoveries in the kitchen where Dickinson baked her famous gingerbread, the pantry where she composed and read poems, the family dining room, secondfloor bed chambers, and rooms that housed the Amherst residents who worked for the Dickinson family. Now in the exploratory phase–a brief window when modern finishes have been removed and restoration work has not yet begun–this wing of the house has never been seen this way and will not remain in its current condition for long! From wear patterns on the original floorboards, to the “ghosts” of the poet’s pantry cupboards, you’ll see up close how new understandings of everyday life at the Homestead are shaping the final restoration plan.
Jane Wald is the Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum. She has worked in the public history and literary sites for more than thirty-five years and has been executive director of the Dickinson Museum for twenty years. Her interests in literary and cultural history, combined with her background in historical archaeology and material culture, have been a particular strength at the Emily Dickinson Museum in its first decades. In 2006, Wald helped to create a master plan for stabilization, preservation, and restoration of the two Dickinson family homes, grounds, and collections, and has systematically implemented each of its recommendations ever since. Critical projects have included preservation measures at both historic Dickinson houses including installation of fire detection and suppression and museum-grade mechanical systems. Significant restoration projects have included the Homestead library, original 1813 house, Emily Dickinson’s bed chamber, and reconstruction from original materials of Dickinson’s cherished conservatory.
Wald has presented numerous lectures, talks, and papers about Emily Dickinson, the Museum, and especially the material and cultural contexts of Dickinson’s environment. Of particular relevance to this “Behind the Scenes” program are publications including “A Short Biography of the Homestead and The Evergreens,” in The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (2022); “’The Poet Hunters’; Transforming Emily Dickinson’s Home into Literary Destination” in the Emily Dickinson Journal (2017); “’Pretty Much Real Life’: the Material World of the Dickinson Family” for the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson (2014); and “’Better than Heaven’: Emily Dickinson’s Religious Texts” for the Dickinson Electronic Archive. She received an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, graduate degree in American History from Princeton University, and historical archaeology graduate work at the College of William and Mary.
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.