Phosphorescence September 2021 featured poets:
Chloe Martinez, Rodney A. Brown, Elizabeth Metzger and Moriel Rothman-Zecher
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
This virtual program is free to attend and is part of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival. Registration is required. Registration is now available through the Festival’s virtual platform
To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence, was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. The 2021 Series will be a virtual event to ensure the health and safety of participants. While we are disappointed not to gather together in Amherst, we are excited to connect with a global community of friends and writers. Join us on the last Thursdays of each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.
Amherst Books is the preferred book seller for the Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series.
This program is co-produced by The Common, a literary organization based at Amherst College with a mission to deepen our individual and collective sense of place. The Common publishes works that embody particular times and places and feature new and underrepresented voices from around the world.
About the program host: Sofia Belimova is a senior at Amherst College and the fourth annual Thomas E. Wood ’61 Fellow at The Common, where she has worked since 2019. Her writing has been published in The Amherst Student, The Common, and Cerealization, an online publication that pairs artists and writers. In May 2021, she received the The Peter Burnett Howe Prize for fiction and the 19th Century English Novel Prize. Sofia’s literary interests include ballads and folktales, contemporary poetry, and the Gothic aesthetic. She is currently writing a thesis on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
About this month’s poets:
Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020) and a full-length collection, forthcoming from The Word Works in Fall 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Shenandoah, The Common and elsewhere. She teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
chloeavmartinez.com
Rodney A. Brown is a poet, writer, choreographer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work draws on he(r) experiences with AIDS, mental illness, and homelessness. He(r) writing has appeared in the Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, and their performances on Black lives and mental health have been sponsored at the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Congress on Research in Dance and the United States Conference on AIDS. They taught as a choreographer at the university level and attended the Saint Francis College MFA program in creative writing.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of the chapbook, Bed (Tupelo, 2021), selected by Mark Bibbins for the Sunken Garden Poetry Contest, and Lying In, forthcoming from Milkweed in 2023. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers (UMass, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for a first book of poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief, 2017). She was the 2013 winner of the Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, and her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among other places. Her prose has recently been published in Conjunctions, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
elizabethmetzger.com
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novel Sadness Is a White Bird (Atria Books, 2018), for which he received the National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ Honor, and which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Piece Prize, the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the winner of the Cincinnati Books by the Banks Author Award, and long listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His essays and poems have been published in The Common Magazine, Haaretz, The New York Times, The Paris Review’s Daily, Runner’s World, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, ZYZZYVA Magazine, and elsewhere.
morielrothmanzecher.com
Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of our programs. All gifts are tax deductible.
Dennis James Sweeney is the author of In the Antarctic Circle, winner of the 2020 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and forthcoming in March 2021, as well as four chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Prelude, Poor Claudia, Quarterly West, and Territory, among others. A Small Press Editor of Entropy, he has an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Nicole M. Young is a performer, poet, playwright, director, event producer/curator, and nonprofit professional with over 20 years of experience combined in these areas. Nicole has worked across various disciplines, including theatre, poetry, and classical music. Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Nicole currently resides in Northern Connecticut and works in Western Massachusetts. 
Amina Jordan Mendez is a queer poet/performer. She works as a teaching artist for the award winning Enchanted Circle Theater of Holyoke, MA, and is a Ford Tubman Healthy Living Organizer. Her work is focused on community engagement through arts and activism. She is the recipient of the 2020 Emerging Writers Fellowship sponsored by the Straw Dog Writers Guild of Western Massachusetts.
Melissa Range is the author of two collections of poetry: Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider, a winner of the Walt McDonald Prize (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Ecotone, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. 
Philip F. Clark is the author of The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), and teaches at City College, New York, where he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2016. He is a Poetry Editor at The Night Heron Barks, A&U Magazine, and The Poet’s Grin. His poetry and writing has been published in Tiferet Journal (nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize), Vox Populi, Re: An Ideas Journal, Lambda Literary and other publications. 
Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Said Not Said (Graywolf Press, 2017). Graywolf also published his collections Full Moon Boat (2000) and The Looking House (2009). His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize from the Word Works. In 2002 Dedalus Press of Dublin Ireland brought out House on Water, House in Air, a new and selected poems. 
Mervyn Taylor a Trinidad-born poet and longtime Brooklyn resident, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including No Back Door (2010), Voices Carry (2017), and most recently, Country of Warm Snow (2020), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which has also been long listed for the Bocas Prize. His chapbook, News of the Living: Corona Poems was published by Broadstone Books in 2020. Currently, he serves as co-editor on the Advisory Board of Slapering Hol Press, Hudson Valley, New York.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, awarded the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, awarded the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. She has received fellowships and scholarships to Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is the Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
Amy Dryansky has published two poetry collections; the second, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry) received the Massachusetts Book Award. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home, won the New England/New York Award from Alice James. Her work is included in several anthologies and individual poems appear in Harvard Review, New England Review, Memorious, Orion, The Sun, Tin House, and other journals. She’s received honors from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a former Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA. She directs the Culture, Brain & Development Program at Hampshire College and parents two children. 
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2021), and co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018) and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in Poetry, Alaskan Quarterly Review, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, and many other places. A Kundiman Fellow, he lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan and teaches at Grand Valley State University.
