Greetings from the Emily Dickinson Museum!

Here in Amherst, Massachusetts it's a bit chilly, but inside the Homestead and the Evergreens things are warming up as March opens our 2008 season. In preparation for another blockbuster year, we have extended our schedule of open hours.


MARCH - DECEMBER
Wednesday- Sunday
11am - 5pm

Extended Summer Hours

JUNE - AUGUST
Wednesday- Sunday
10am - 6pm
Closed major holidays.

We have planned a very special and exciting season for you this year, so read on with news of events and programs at the Emily Dickinson Museum in the weeks ahead.

(left: Robert Browning)

Dr. Vincent F. Petronella earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor of English, Emeritus, Univ. of Mass., Boston, Dr. Petronella is a seminar leader for Beacon Hill Seminars in Boston. He teaches courses in Shakespeare, the poetry of the Brownings and John Keats, the Fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and the plays of George Bernard Shaw. He has published numerous articles on these topics, lectures frequently, is a board member for the Beacon Hill Seminars, and past president of the Boston Browning Society. His forthcoming essay in the Browning Society Notes (published by the London Browning Society 2008) is entitled: "Robert Browning's Poetry and the Italian Risorgimento."

Contact Cindy Dickinson, Director of Interpretation and Programming, 413/542/8429
csdickinson@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Galway Kinnell will read a selection of his favorite poems, including work by Dickinson, as well as some of his own work. A reception and booksigning will follow. This program celebrates National Poetry Month.

Galway Kinnell counts among his earliest influences the poetry of Emily Dickinson. After a tour in the U.S. Navy, Kinnell joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and spent much of the 1960s involved in the Civil Rights Movement. His many experiences with social activism during this time, including an arrest while participating in a workplace integration in Louisiana, found their way into his collection Body Rags (1968), and especially The Book of Nightmares (1971), a book-length poem concerned with the Vietnam War. Additional works include his first, What a Kingdom It Was, published in 1960; Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964); Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Imperfect Thirst (1996); A New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; and Strong Is Your Hold (2006).

Kinnell's honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges and universities and divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.

Celebrate the release of Christopher Benfey's latest book, A Summer of Hummingbirds. Benfey maps the intricate web of friendship, family, and romance that connected Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, all of whom found themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of strict restraint and the new romantic, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.

Benfey reveals how, through the art of these great thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image through which they could explore their controversial ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time, exoticism, and beauty, all which would come to shape American thought.

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He is a prolific critic and essayist who writes for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. He also serves as a regular art critic for the online magazine Slate. Benfey has published three books set in the American Gilded Age: The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Degas in New Orleans, and The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.

Speaker: Anne Flick
This month's discussion will focus on the topic of the Civil War in Dickinson's poetry.

Contact Cindy Dickinson, Director of Interpretation and Programming, 413/542/8429
csdickinson@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

For more information about the 8th Annual Juniper Festival, please email: juniper@hfa.umass.edu

This spring, Kinsmen of the Shelf, the Museum's book discussion group, takes up The Selected Poems of Robert Browning.

The discussion will be led by Cornelia Pearsall, Associate Professor of English at Smith College, received her B.A. and her Ph.D. in English from Yale University. She teaches a range of courses on Victorian and Modern literature and culture. Her book Tennyson's Rapture is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and she is completing another book, titled Imperial Tennyson, on the centrality of the poet laureate to late Victorian imperial expansion.

Located in the Tour Center.
Free