Celebrate Emily Dickinson’s birthday at the Folger Shakespeare Library! Join us for our annual tribute to Dickinson, featuring presentations by distinguished scholar Martha Nell Smith and artist, writer, and editor Jen Bervin.
Jen Bervin is an artist and writer whose research-driven interdisciplinary projects often weave together art and writing, text and textiles, science and life. She has published ten books, including The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems with Marta Werner and Silk Poems, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a CLMP Firecracker Award. Her work can be found in more than thirty international collections and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center and BRIC in Brooklyn, and featured in exhibitions at MASS MoCA, The Power Plant in Toronto, Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Artisterium in Tbilisi, Georgia. Bervin’s honors include fellowships from the Asian Cultural Council, Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, Bogliasco Foundation, Camargo Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, NYFA, Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Rauschenberg Residency, and Creative Capital.
Martha Nell Smith is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. Her publications include seven singly and coauthored/coedited books, most recently, Emily Dickinson, A User’s Guide. Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects, Smith co-edited Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry, and serves on the Advisory Board of Harvard University Press’s Emily Dickinson Archive. The recipient of numerous awards from the NEH, the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, Smith is a founding board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society, for which she serves as President. Featured in a documentary about Dickinson, My Letter to the World, Smith’s work was foundational for Wild Nights with Emily, an award-winning feature film starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson.
Co-sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and Poetry Society of America.
Free and open to the public.
