Phosphorescence September 2024 featured poets:
Jane Huffman, Molly Akin, and Diane Seuss
Tell It Slant Poetry Festival 2024
VIRTUAL PROGRAM – Part of Tell It Slant Poetry Festival
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:
Molly Akin is a writer based in coastal Massachusetts. A Kansas City native, she explored the world as an “unschooled” teenager before earning a BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MA from Harvard University Extension School. Her work is informed by her experiences as a woman, mother, and person living with invisible disabilities. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in TulipTree Review’s 2023 Wild Woman Story Contest and her work is included in the print edition. She is currently working on her first collection with the support of a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. mollyakin.com
Jane Huffman’s debut collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Dana Levin. Jane is a doctoral student in English and literary arts at the University of Denver and is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. janehuffman.com
Diane Seuss is the author of six collections of poetry. The most recent is Modern Poetry, (Graywolf Press 2024). frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press), received the Juniper Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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