Celebrating 15 Years
Join the Emily Dickinson Museum and The Common on September 23rd at 6PM EDT for the Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series, celebrating present-day literary craft that echoes Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary voice. This reading features Elizabeth Metzger, Chloe Martinez, Rodney A. Brown, and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, all of whose work has been published in The Common.
This event is part of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, which brings together contemporary creativity of the Pioneer Valley and Dickinson’s legendary writing. This fully virtual festival, running September 20th – 26th, will feature panels, readings, and masterclasses. All of these events are free and open to the public, but registration is required to access the links. Please register here.
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Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine. A former Holden Scholar and Mellon Mays Fellow, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College. www.chloeAVmartinez.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, among other honors. His second novel is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022. Moriel’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, The Common, Barrelhouse, Paper Brigade, and elsewhere, and he is the recipient of a 2018 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ Honor and a 2020 MacDowell Fellowship.
Rodney A. Brown is an artist whose work draws on he(r) experiences with AIDS, mental illness, and homelessness. He(r) writing has appeared in Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, and their performances on Black lives and mental health have been sponsored at the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Congress on Research in Dance and the United States Conference on AIDS. Typescenes became the first Prose Choreopoem to win The National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. Currently exhibiting in The Bronx at BAAD! Brown taught as a choreographer at the university level and attended Saint Francis College in Brooklyn MFA program in creative writing. 
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of the chapbook, Bed, selected by Mark Bibbins for The Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, forthcoming November 2021 from Tupelo Press. Her second full-length collection, Lying In, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2023. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for a first book of poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have been published inThe New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and American Poetry Review, among others. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
The program will be hosted by Sofia Belimova, a senior at Amherst College and the fourth annual Thomas E. Wood ’61 Fellow at The Common, where she has worked since 2019. Her writing has been published in The Amherst Student, The Common, and Cerealization, an online publication that pairs artists and writers. In May 2021, she received the The Peter Burnett Howe Prize for fiction and the 19th Century English Novel Prize.
