Open Me Carefully

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. When volumes of her poems began to be published in the 1890s, she and her work became a sensation. Over four decades Dickinson carried on an erotically-charged intimate correspondence of poems, letters, and letter-poems with her beloved sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, sending her far more of her literary works than she sent to any other, and in this trove is the only instance we have of Dickinson rewriting a poem to suit her reader. Ellen Louise Hart began reading Emily Dickinson as a teenager in Vermont where she grew up, and continued her Dickinson studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Dickinson’s poetry was the subject of her Masters’ degree at Mills College in Oakland, California, and also her doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she taught literature and writing for over 22 years. Her Masters and Ph.D. theses led to her work in Open Me Carefully. Hart is the author of articles on Dickinson and editing that have appeared in The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Emily Dickinson Journal, An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, The Women's Review of Books and The Heath Anthology of American Literature. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, and after ten years of teaching at Portland State University and Portland Community College is happily retired. Martha Nell Smith is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. Her publications include Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, the coedited Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (UVP Rotunda Editions) and a coedited (with Baihua Wang) Chinese collection of essays, I dwell in Possibility: Collaborative Emily Dickinson Translation Project (2021). Smith is completing Susan Dickinson, Emily’s Most Faithful Reader, a cultural biography. Smith’s work was foundational for the award-winning feature film Wild Nights with Emily (2018), and she consulted on Apple TV’s Dickinson (2019-2021). Smith also founded and serves as Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives and the DEA2 and is the lead editor of Writings by Susan Dickinson.

Faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form... Iridescent, puzzling, explosive