• Poetry workshops for students of high school (grades 9-12). 45-minute classroom session, to be offered up to four times between 7:50am to 3pm. Partner schools will be shared with selected poets and will include schools in Hampshire and Hampden counties.

• Daytime poetry workshops, panels, or participatory programs open to the public to occur at a variety of Festival venues, including on site at the Emily Dickinson Museum, at the Jones Library, Hope and Feathers Art Gallery, etc. (Examples of participatory programs might include mobile activities, resource booths, etc.). Event sessions are typically an hour and a half long. 

• Only submissions made in the online form will be considered. There is no fee to submit proposals.
• Following your submission, please e-mail your resume/cv to edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org. 
  • Include “POETRY FESTIVAL SUBMISSION” in the title of the e-mail. We can accept .pdf, .doc, .docx files.
    If applicable, you may also submit an image in .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, and .png format.
• Selected facilitators will be notified by August 9, and will be asked to sign a letter of agreement confirming their participation in the Festival.
• Submissions Due: Thursday, July 25, 2019, 11:59 pm EST.

Submissions will be judged on the following:

• Originality – Is your idea bold and intriguing? Will it offer something new to our Festival?
• Quality – Does the submission reflect thoughtful preparation? How are you uniquely qualified to facilitate this program?
• Audience – Have you clearly outlined participatory elements? How does your proposal contribute to community-building for the Amherst Poetry Festival? 
• Special consideration will be given to Pioneer Valley and Massachusetts-based facilitators.

1-4PM at the Emily Dickinson Museum

You are cordially invited to celebrate Emily Dickinson’s 189th birthday at her home, the Emily Dickinson Museum! On December 14 join us for a festive open house. Tour the houses for free, enjoy the Holiday decorations and live music, create an artistic postcard to add to our “The World Writes Back: Postcards to Emily Dickinson” project, and, of course, enjoy coconut cake made from the poet’s own recipe. All are welcome and no fee or reservations are required. 

About Dickinson’s birthday: Emily Dickinson, the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830, in the family Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. She celebrated 55 birthdays before her death in 1886. As an adult she wrote, “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” (Johnson L379)

Birthday Celebration Schedule:

1PM Open House begins:

• Walk through the Homestead and The Evergreens at your leisure and talk with our knowledgeable guides.
• Don’t forget to check out the exhibition of postcards to Emily in the Homestead!
• Crafts: At the Homestead create your own artistic postcard to hang in our exhibition. At the Evergreens create a traditional ornament to hang on the Dickinson family Christmas tree.

1PM-1:20PM Yosen Wang String Quartet at the Homestead

1:20-2PM Festive piano music at The Evergreens by Alex Santos

2-3PM Festive piano music at The Evergreens by Sebastian Son

• Sebastian Son is a junior at Amherst College. He majors in English, and in his free time loves to play music and perform on stage. Around campus, he sings in an a capella group (DQ) and performs with the Theater and Dance Department. He is slated to sing and act in Anna Plummer’s senior project, the Puddle Jumping Society, which opens on March 26th at Amherst College.

2:30PM Coconut Cake is served! Learn more about Dickinson’s recipe for this tasty treat here.

3-3:30PM Festive piano music at The Evergreens by Yee-Lynn Lee

3:30-4PM Festive piano music at The Evergreens by Anna Buswell

4PM Open House concludes.

Join us in Washington D.C. at the Folger Shakespeare Library on December 9 to celebrate the birthday of Emily Dickinson!

Each year, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute brings speakers, scholars, and fans of Emily Dickinson’s work together to celebrate the illustrious poet and her writing. This year, the event will feature Tom Sleigh, reading from his favorite Dickinson poems and sharing his own work, and Lesley Dill, the winner of this year’s Tell It Slant Award. 

To purchase tickets to the Birthday Tribute, please visit the Folger’s website. 

More about the artists:

Artist Lesley Dill works with paper, wire, horsehair, photography, foil, bronze, and music. Her artworks are in the collections of over 50 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her opera based on Dickinson’s poems, Divide Light, was performed by New York’s New Camerata Opera Company in 2018.

Tom Sleigh’s ten books of poetry include Army Cats (John Updike Award) and Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Award). His book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees, is being published as a companion piece to his latest book of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin.

Join us at the Emily Dickinson Museum during Amherst Arts Night Plus on December 5, 2019 for our monthly Open Mic. Poets, writers, and performers of any kind are welcome! Come early to view the pop-up, contemporary art exhibition in the Homestead by our featured artist. The open mic begins at 6:00 p.m. and will be followed by this month’s featured readers. Those who would like to share their work should arrive between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. to sign up.

Featured Readers: Readings follow the open mic

The Literacy Project presents ‘Our Mirror: Reflections of The Valley’. These original poems, essays, and stories are written and read by students of The Literacy Project. The Literacy Project provides adult basic education programs and opportunities that support participants to engage meaningfully and equitably in the economic, social, cultural and civic life of their communities. With a staff of 20 and 75 volunteers, the Project now offers classes in basic literacy, high school equivalency and college and career readiness at 5 locations in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts: Greenfield, Orange, Northampton, Amherst and Ware.

The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group meets monthly, September through May, for lively conversation about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters. The Poetry Discussion Group meets at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, on the second floor of Amherst College’s Frost Library. Participants should proceed directly to the Library and do not need to stop at the Museum. While no RSVP is required, participants are invited to email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org to receive a list of poems for discussion. Attendees are welcome to bring a bag lunch. Beverages and a sweet snack are provided.

November Poetry Discussion Group will meet on November 8, 2019 at 12PM. 

November’s discussion will consider how the nineteenth century dramatic lyric monologue, developed by Browning and Tennyson, impacted Dickinson’s poetry. In many letters, Dickinson underlined how important these British poets, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, were for her work. In July 1862, Dickinson even echoed Browning’s well-known definition of the dramatic lyric when she told Higginson: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person” (L268). Together, we will consider how Dickinson employs—and complicates—the lyric monologue in her own poetry by focusing on a range of poems from the 1860s.

Facilitator: Páraic Finnerty is Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare and co-author of Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (2013). He is currently working on a monograph entitled Dickinson and her British Contemporaries, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Emily Dickinson International Society and serves on the Editorial Board of the Emily Dickinson Journal.

Meeting Notes

• Center of Humanistic Inquiry Address: 61 Quadrangle Dr, Amherst. This event will be held in the seminar room, the classroom on the left at the top of the stairs.
• Parking – attendees may park in the Amherst College Alumni Lot and walk to the library free of charge. Metered parking is available closer to campus on the Town Common. Some select spots and accessible parking are available on campus, around the quad and behind the Frost Library. Participants with a state-issued handicap placard may park in any accessible spaces on campus. See the Amherst College campus parking map for more information.
• Program cost – Drop-in fees are as follows: $12 for EDM Friends (Members); $15 for Non-Members.