December 10 will mark Emily Dickinson's 168th birthday, and Mount Holyoke will celebrate with its second annual Dickinson birthday party, complete with cake. Sponsored by the women's studies program, the event has been organized by professors Jane Crosthwaite and Martha Ackmann, in conjunction with Jan Freeman of Paris Press in Ashfield. Speakers will read from the latest work on the poet, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998).
Six women will read the love letters and poems from Dickinson's thirty-six-year correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson. This correspondence is newly available through Paris Press and has been co-edited by Ellen Louis Hart '76 and Martha Nell Smith. Readings from the work will be given by Elsa Bakalar, Bertha Josephson, lê thi diem thúy, Kate Nugent, and Kate Rushin. Following the readings, Hart, co-editor of Open Me Carefully, will contextualize the book. Hart teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Celebratory events have also been planned by the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst and Amherst's Jones Library.
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