March 17, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.-Writer Christopher Benfey and photographer Jerry Liebling will speak about The Dickinsons of Amherst at Saturday April 3 at 1 p.m. in the First Congregational Church (165 Main Street in Amherst). Benfey contributed, with Polly Longsworth and Barton Levi St. Armand, to the 2001 book The Dickinsons of Amherst that featured, according to The New York Times, Liebling's "romantic, ghost-filled photos of the Evergreens and the Dickinson Homestead." The talk is sponsored by The Emily Dickinson Museum.

Benfey, a professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College, is known as a Dickinson scholar. An art critic for the online magazine Slate and author of Degas in New Orleans (1997), Benfey also wrote The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992) and Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others (1984). His poems have appeared in the Paris Review and Ploughshares.

Jerome Liebling's work has been exhibited and collected at major museums and galleries through the United States as well as in Europe and Japan. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships. Among his books of photographs are The Minnesota Photographs, 1949-69 (1997), The People, Yes (1995) and Jerome Liebling Photographs (1982). He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the State University of New York at New Paltz, Yale University and Hampshire College, where he is now Professor Emeritus.

Benfey and Liebling will speak as part of a series of events that will take place during the week of March 28 and April 3, in a program titled " 'A little Madness in the Spring': Celebrating History and Poetry at The Emily Dickinson Museum." For more information about this reading and the rest of the week's events at the Dickinson Museum, visit www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org.

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