No charge for the program. Advance registration required. Register online in order to receive the Zoom session invitation link and readings packet. Please email Michael Bellacosa at mbellacosa@wiltonlibrary.org with any questions.

Someone said that Emily Dickinson made “the abstract tangible to define meaning without confining it.”  Her images and extended metaphors are outstanding, both literally and figuratively. Dealing with ageless themes of love, death, hope, grief, and religion that affect all of us, she mastered the art of writing verse.

Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts was born in 1830 and died in 1886.  She lived among other great New England writers of her time: Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Poe and Whitman on Long Island.  She was timelessly modern in her style of writing different from the flowery, rhyming style of her contemporary women poets.

The Bible and Shakespeare were her constant companions. She attended Amherst Academy where she had a taste of progressive education, intellectual challenges and relative freedom for girls. However, she did not feel at home at Mount Holyoke Academy where she only stayed a year .She would not genuflect in the chapel. Emily had her own complex arguments with God. She was influenced by the Calvinist beliefs, and, at the time, the transcendental ideas.

In her lifetime she had about a dozen poems published in newspapers. She wasn’t known until her first volume was published after her death in 1890 with the help of Mabel Loomis Todd (her brother Austin’s lover), and the publisher Thomas Wentworth Higginson with whom she had a fiery correspondence. In 1995, Thomas H. Johnson published her poems in Final Harvest.  However, in 1998 R.W. Franklin honored Emily Dickinson: the exact order, punctuation, spelling and stanza breaks of all her poems are immortalized.

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, “Borrowed Scenery,” Yuganta Press, and “Through the Trees of Autumn,” Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild. Several of her poems have been published in Ameythst Review.