Events & Calendars Amherst Arts Night Plus Open Mic

Join us during Amherst Arts Night Plus on June 6, 2019 for our monthly Open Mic. Poets, writers, and performers of any kind are welcome! Come early to view the pop-up, contemporary art exhibition in the Homestead by our featured artist, Kandy Vermeer Phillips. The open mic begins at 6:00 p.m. and will be followed by this month's featured reader. Those who would like to share their work should arrive between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. to sign up.

This month's Featured Poet: Naila Moreira is most often inspired by the natural world. After earning her doctorate in geology at University of Michigan, she worked as a journalist, Seattle Aquarium docent, and environmental consultant. She now teaches at Smith College and has served as writer in residence at the Shoals Marine Laboratory in Maine and Forbes Library in Northampton, MA. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction are published or forthcoming in Terrain.org, The Boston Globe, Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Cape Rock, Connecticut River Review, Rosarium Press Trouble the Waters anthology, and other venues, and her second poetry chapbook, Water Street (Finishing Line Press, 2017) won the New England Poetry Club Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. She writes a monthly environment column for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

This month's Featured Speaker: Join Master Gardener and garden historian Marta McDowell for an informal talk on Emily Dickinson’s wildflowers. Following the relationship between the pen and the trowel led MartaMcDowell to Emily Dickinson for Emily Dickinson’s Gardens (2005), which will be reprinted in full color by Timber Press in 2019. Marta also scripted the Emily Dickinson Museum’s landscape audio tour, and was an advisor for the New York Botanical Garden’s 2010 show, “Emily Dickinson’s Gardens: The Poetry of Flowers.” Her other works include The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017), All the Presidents Gardens (2016) and Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (2013).

This month’s Featured Artist: Kandy Vermeer Phillips’s “Poetry in Silver: The Language of Flowers in the Works of Emily Dickinson.” This ongoing series of silverpoint drawings compares specimens found in Dickinson’s herbarium to those housed in the U.S. National Herbarium. “Poetry in Silver” highlights several of these cherished woodland flowers that inspired Dickinson’s poetry along with her use of the popular Language of Flowers.