VIRTUAL PROGRAM
Emily Dickinson is having a moment. The enigmatic poet’s popularity has surged in recent years, thanks in part to fresh interpretations and perspectives offered up by a new wave of curious and talented artists, writers, and thinkers.
We’re delighted to invite our donors to join Museum Director Jane Wald as she welcomes Alena Smith, creator of the award-winning Apple TV+ series Dickinson, and Martha Ackmann, author of These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, to a virtual event broadcast from the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, MA.
Enjoy a lively conversation about Emily Dickinson and her enduring legacy, while you sip on the evening’s signature cocktail:
The Bee’s Knees
- 2 ounces gin (for mocktail, substitute w/ 2 ounces of ginger ale)
- 3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
- 3/4 oz honey syrup (1 TBSP honey mixed with 1/2 TBSP warm water)
Combine ingredients and shake with ice. Strain and pour into a coupe glass. Garnish with a lemon twist. Enjoy!
This program is free to donors who’ve supported the Museum this past year. To those who have already donated, we sent an email with a complimentary registration link.
Please contact connect@emilydickinsonmuseum.org if you need another invitation by email.
In case you are unable to attend, a recording of the event will be shared to all those who register for the program.
Not a donor, but still want to attend? You’re invited!
Become a donor today and register.
About the speakers:
Alena Smith Alena Smith is a playwright and TV writer. She is the creator, showrunner and executive producer of the critically-acclaimed series “Dickinson” starring Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Dickinson, which recently aired its second season on Apple TV+, and is currently in production on its third. Dickinson won a Peabody Award in the category of Entertainment, and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comedy series.Smith previously served as a writer and producer for Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Newsroom. Variety said of her play Icebergs, which had its world premiere in 2016 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, “Smith shows impeccable comic timing, and also knows how to layer her drama with pathos.” Other published plays include The Bad Guys, Plucker, The Lacy Project, and The New Sincerity, which The New York Times called “Splendid… entertaining and thought-provoking… comedy with a poignant edge.”
Learn more: New Yorker
Martha Ackmann is a journalist and author who writes about women who have changed America. Her essays and columns have appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, and The Atlantic. She also is a frequent commentator for New England Public Radio, and has been featured on CNN, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Martha’s award-winning books include The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League, and These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson. A long-time member of the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College, Martha taught a popular seminar on Emily Dickinson in the poet’s house, now the Emily Dickinson Museum, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Learn more: marthaackmann.com
The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, a biennial event based in Boston, MA, returns May 13-16, 2021 for a virtual showcase featuring 50+ readings panels, workshops, performances and more. Find more information or register for other Festival events today at 
Cammy Thomas’ first book, Cathedral of Wish, received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second, Inscriptions. Her third collection, Tremors, is forthcoming in 2021. All are published by Four Way Books. Her work appeared recently in the anthology, Poems in the Aftermath. Two of her poems under the title Far Past War were set to music by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas. The premiere of this choral work will be performed by the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington DC on Oct. 17, 2021. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Danielle Legros Georges is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. She is a professor in and director of the Lesley University MFA program in Creative Writing, and taught in the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences Writer’s Workshop, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. She was appointed the second Poet Laureate of the city of Boston, serving in the role from 2015 to 2019, and collaborating with literary and visual artists, museums and galleries. The Massachusetts Artists Leaders Coalition recognized her civic work with a Champion of Artists Award in 2017. She is the editor of City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems. Her most recent work is a book of translations from the French, Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert, published by Subpress Collective in 2021.
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.
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.
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.