Meet a Poem is a new teaching resource designed to help educators bring analysis of Dickinson’s poetry into the classroom. Every lesson guide in the series is authored by a different scholar, offering distinct perspectives and expert instructional frameworks for each featured poem.
The Emily Dickinson Museum is pleased to present the first 3 lesson guides in this series. We encourage you to download and print these files.
Questions? Please reach out to education@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
Color – Caste – Denomination –
Fr836
Lesson guide by Bruce M. Penniman, Ed.D.
Bruce M. Penniman taught writing, speech, and literature at Amherst Regional High School from 1971 until 2007 and recently retired (again) as the site director of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1999 he was Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and a finalist for National Teacher of the Year, and he is the author of Building the English Classroom: Foundations, Support, Success (NCTE, 2009). He has served as a teacher curriculum mentor in all four NEH workshops and has facilitated the Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group program.
Perhaps I asked too large –
Fr358
Lesson guide by Sylvie Cathrall
Sylvie Cathrall is the author of the Sunken Archive duology. Her first novel, A Letter to the Luminous Deep, was an Indies Introduce debut pick and one of Library Journal’s best books of 2024. She lives in Wales with her spouse (formerly her pen pal) and their child (currently an inquisitive toddler).
This is my letter to the World
Fr519
Lesson guide by Tina Cane
Tina Cane is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (2016-2024). A 2020 fellow with the Academy of American Poets, Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, and Year of the Murder Hornet. Creator/curator of the distance series Poetry is Bread, and editor of Poetry is Bread: The Anthology, Cane has also published two verse novels for younger readers, Alma Presses Play and Are You Nobody Too? (Penguin/ Random House).