HYBRID PROGRAM — In-person at Amherst College’s Frost Library and streaming live for online registrants
Celebrating a new edition of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence — expanded and revised for the first time in over sixty years.
In-person tickets are now sold out. Please register to join us online!
Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections—alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical—with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appears in her many facets as a reader, writer, and thinker; social commentator and comedian; friend, neighbor, sister, and daughter.
Join editor Cristanne Miller along with Brooke Steinhauser (Senior Director of Programs at the Emily Dickinson Museum) for a lively conversation about this new edition.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson is the first collected edition of the poet’s correspondence since 1958. It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents. Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 “letter-poems” that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose. This edition also redates much of her correspondence, relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical events, and details about flora and fauna to locate the letters more precisely in time. Finally, updated annotations place Dickinson’s writing more firmly in relation to national and international events, as well as the rhythms of daily life in her hometown. What emerges is not the reclusive Dickinson of legend but a poet firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.
“Dickinson’s letters shed light on the soaring and capacious mind of a great American poet and her vast world of relationships. This edition presents her correspondence anew, in all its complexity and brilliance.
This extraordinary collection shows [Dickinson] to be a masterful prose writer…An exciting new standard in Dickinson scholarship.”
Kirkus Reviews
About the editors
Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Her many books include Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century, and Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them.
Domhnall Mitchell is Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts and Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception.
“This brilliantly expansive and comprehensive collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters shows us just how deeply she was embedded in her social world. Here we see, in Dickinson’s own words, a writer exchanging ideas with a wide circle of friends and family members, honing her abilities as a poet, and grappling with a nation torn by war over slavery and race. In these letters, we see the life of a genius unfold.”
Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“Drawing deeply on more than three decades of editorial scholarship, Miller and Mitchell give us a Dickinson both inseparable from her own time and indispensable to ours. Meticulously edited from archival sources and annotated with immense care, this work overwhelmingly shows that both Dickinson’s poems and her letters issue from a singular impetus: to seek in language—often formally experimental, always compelling—new ways to express the strangeness and beauty of our experiences as finite beings in the world.”
Marta Werner, author of Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours
A thrilling read that wholly immerses us in Dickinson’s world. It seems Dickinson thought in poetry, as the characteristic cadence of her poems recurs in the letters themselves. Especially fascinating is the continuity of her long flirtatious argument with God, taken up in correspondence with her school friends, with eminent public figures, and in the poems she enclosed. Miller and Mitchell present a masterfully curated abundance. To read it is to encounter a mind on fire.
Rae Armantrout, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“The Letters of Emily Dickinson provides a vital window into not only the poet’s inner life and art, but also her surprisingly wide social world. Miller and Mitchell, two of our foremost Dickinson scholars, have produced a fresh, definitive edition for the twenty-first century, tracking the relationship of poems to letters and precisely locating these treasures in their time and place.”
Bonnie Costello, coeditor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore
SOLD OUT
In an obituary for Emily Dickinson, her sister in law, Susan Dickinson wrote of the poet’s many “duties beautifully done.” In the wake of Emily’s death, Susan’s own sense of duty and that of her daughter Martha, and Martha’s heir Mary Hampson, preserved the family’s memories of the poet as well as her material legacy. These women of The Evergreens left their own legacies of duty and devotion evident in the condition of the uniquely preserved house today. 
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, Marilyn Nelson and Abigail Chabitnoy, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with Terry Blackhawk. Stay for music by Daphne Parker Powell, refreshments, and book signing under our heated Festival tent.
Anna Baryshnikov is an actor and writer who lives in New York City. Select TV roles: Lavinia Dickinson on “Dickinson” (Apple), “Superior Donuts” (CBS), “Prodigal Son” (FOX), “Good Girls Revolt” (Amazon), and “Doll & Em” (HBO). Theater: Sam Hunter’s A Bright New Boise (Signature Theatre), Time and The Conways (Broadway/Roundabout Theater Company) Film: Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea,” “The Kindergarten Teacher,” “Josie & Jack,” and the upcoming A24 film “Love Lies Bleeding” where she’ll appear opposite Kristen Stewart. Training: Northwestern University.
Adrian Blake Enscoe (He/They) is an actor and musician from Brooklyn, NY. Originally growing up in the woody outlands of Upstate New York, he earned a BFA in Theater at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh before landing in NYC, meeting his now-wife Sydney Shepherd on a subway, and founding the folk band Bandits on the Run with Shepherd and their close friend Regina Strayhorn. In between writing and touring with the Bandits — whose past few years have included recording their EP Now Is The Time with grammy-winning producer Ryan Hadlock, writing and recording songs for the Netflix series StoryBots, and playing a string of dates at the Singapore F1 Grand Prix — Adrian has been a long time musical collaborator of actor/writer/musician Christopher Sears and developed the role of The Fool in Sears’ Moonchildren Opera. Adrian is also a stage and film actor; in addition to starring as Austin Dickinson opposite Hailee Steinfeld in the Apple TV+ breakout series Dickinson, he originated the role of Little Brother in the world premier of Swept Away (based on the music of the Avett Brothers) and will be reprising the role this coming December at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Most recently, Adrian has been developing a musical adaptation of the book What’s Eating Gilbert Grape with writer/director Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) and longtime collaborators Sears, Shepherd, and Strayhorn.
Jennifer Moeller is a Tony Award nominated costume designer for theater, opera and TV. Recent credits include Dickinson for AppleTV+, the revival of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot at Lincoln Center Theater, and Brandon Jacob Jenkin’s new play Comeuppance at Signature Theater. Jennifer is a frequent collaborator of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Nottage and designed the Broadway productions of Sweat and Clyde’s for which she received a Drama Desk Award. Jennifer is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.
