Phosphorescence April 2025 featured poets:
Carlene Kucharczyk, Avia Tadmor, and Silvia Bonilla
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
This virtual program is free to attend. Registration is required.
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 Contemporary Poetry 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. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.
About this month’s poets:
Carlene Kucharczyk’s debut collection “Strange Hymn” is the winner of the Juniper Prize for a first book of poems and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in April 2025. She is the recipient of a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council, and her work has been published in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Conduit, Mid-American Review, and Permafrost Magazine, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was the Henry David Thoreau fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, where she worked for two years in the Writing Program, and was the Writer-in-Residence at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. She has received support from The Center for Book Arts Fine Press Seminar and The Frost Place Poetry Seminar. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University, where she also taught creative and expository writing. She lives in Vermont, and works as an Administrative Assistant in the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College.
Avia Tadmor is the author of the poetry collection “Song in Tammuz,” winner of the Tupelo Press International Berkshire Prize, forthcoming 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, The New Republic, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Avia’s poetry received support from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation/ Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Previously, she has taught writing at Columbia University, where she directed the Columbia Artist/Teachers program, promoting no-cost arts education in schools and community organizations in NYC. Currently, she is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.
aviatadmor.com
Silvia Bonilla was born and raised in South America. She received an MFA in Poetry from The New School. She is the author of a chapbook called “An Animal Startled by The Mechanisms of Life” (Deadly Chaps 2024) and “Town of Eves,” forthcoming from Arizona University Press. Her work has been featured in Blackbird, Green Mountains Review, Cream City Review, Reed, Cimarron Review, among others. She has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, The Staltonstall Foundation, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Community of Writers, Napa Valley, The Frost Place, Colgate Writers Workshop and The Post Graduate Conference at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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.
Please note: the June 9, 2026, session has been canceled. 
Musical performance featuring the poems of Emily Dickinson with music and lyrics by Rosemary Caine!
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips and Sebastian Merrill, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with moderator Kirun Kapur.
Nicole Callihan, Pichchenda Bao, and Jennifer Franklin, the editors of Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) will discuss a group of Dickinson’s poems about the body and embodied experience, particularly her exploration into the often-contradictory needs between body and mind. We will also read a selection of contemporary poems by women and non-binary poets from Braving the Body who have been inspired by Dickinson’s work. We will provide prompts for a generative writing exercise inspired by Dickinson and/or the poems from the anthology. There will be time for interested participants to share their drafts and to receive feedback from the editors.
Just what does a Poet Laureate do? You have questions and we have answers! Two poets from New England will share their poetic work as well as discuss the programs they implemented for their own communities. They will also discuss how they became Poet Laureates, what kinds of opportunities are available through their positions, as well as what sort of pitfalls are present in navigating the role of public poet.
From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a subject that haunts you. We will be looking at how to write and sustain work within a singular focus, obsession, or motif. This workshop introduces poems and works paired with exercises that allow the writer to be haunted by a subject, inviting writers to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that find themselves, suddenly facing the ghosts that visit them frequently. Ultimately, we will look to lines from Dickinson that declare: