Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute

The annual Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute reading, sponsored by the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series with the Poetry Society of America, celebrates Dickinson's fierce and compelling influence on poetry in America. Each year, poets from diverse backgrounds are invited to the Folger to talk about Dickinson and read her work as well as their own. The reading is followed by a reception that features black cake made from Emily Dickinson’s own recipe.

=2010s

• Lucia Perillo's searing honesty combined with wit and gracious talent makes her work not only fun but also enlightening. Perillo has published five books of poetry, most recently Inseminating the Elephant, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and Luck is Luck, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was included in the New York Public Library's "Books to Remember" for 2005. A book of her essays, I've Heard the Vultures Singing, was published in 2008. A former MacArthur fellow, she lives in Olympia, Washington.

• Lucie Brock-Broido is the director of poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Her books of poetry include Trouble in Mind, A Hunger, and The Master Letters, inspired by three mysterious, unsent letters written by Emily Dickinson and found after her death.