Emily Dickinson would have loved Saskatchewan’s warm summer nights!

Join MacKenzie Head Curator, Timothy Long, for a tour of For Emily and finish the evening with a series of Dickinson-inspired poetry performances in the MacKenzie Art Gallery Sculpture Garden, featuring Cindy MacKenzie, Anne Campbell, Judith Krause, and Barbara Dana. Bring your own lawn chair or blanket. This program is free!

Friday, July 24, 2009

7:00pm - 10:00pm

MacKenzie Art Gallery Sculpture Garden

Anne Campbell is an award-winning author of four collections of poetry, with a fifth due, Soul to Touch, due in the fall of 2009. She is presently a Research Fellow at the CPRC University of Regina working on a biography of Arthur McKay, one of the famed Regina Five group of artists. As well as writing with music composer Tom Schudel, Anne’s work has been performed, recorded and published internationally.

Judith Krause is an award-winning Regina writer, editor and teacher whose work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Her most recent publications include her fourth collection of poems, Mongrel Love (Hagios Books, 2008), and a collaborative chapbook, blue transport / the insistence of green (Jack Pine Press, 2007).

Barbara Dana made her New York stage debut at the age of 17 in the off-Broadway production of Arthur Laurents’ A Clearing in the Woods. She appeared on Broadway in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Enter Laughing, Room Service and William Inge’s Where’s Daddy? She was also a member of the improvisational group, Second City, appearing in Chicago and New York. Off-Broadway, Ms. Dana has appeared in a number of movies and TV programs. She is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults. Her first non-fiction book, Wider than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson (Kent State University Press), co-edited with Dickinson scholar Cindy MacKenzie, was published last year. Her latest novel, A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson is just out, published by HarperCollins.

Cindy MacKenzie is an educator who has taught in many classrooms. After receiving a B.A. and B.E.A.D. degrees in French, and spending a semester as au pair for a family in Paris in the early 70s, she began her career teaching French at Central, Campbell, and Thom Collegiates. Eight years later during a maternity leave, she began to take classes in English at the University of Regina, eventually earning another B.A. Honours. This degree was followed by an M.A. and finally, a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her particular interest in nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson began after taking an American Literature class in the mid 80s and since that time, she has pursued her study of this fascinating woman writing both an M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, as well as several articles, three books, and numerous papers presented at conferences in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. While carrying on her teaching at the University of Regina, she is currently working on another book that emphasizes the relationship between Dickinson’s letters and her poetics. As a board member of the Emily Dickinson International Society, she is convening the 2009 annual meeting of scholars and readers of Dickinson in Regina.