Tribute to Emily Dickinson with Paul Legault and Donna Masini

Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.

Bryant Park is proud to honor prolific writer, Emily Dickinson, in celebration of her 195th birthday. 

Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a B.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010) and The Other Poems (Fence Books, 2011). He co-founded and co-edits the translation press Telephone Books. His original collection, The Emily Dickinson Reader, reinterprets Dickinson classics in a modern voice.

Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in New York City. She attended Hunter College and earned her MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the collections 4:30 Movie (W.W. Norton, 2018), Turning to Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2004), and That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), which was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Masini’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Brooklyn Poets, and Renga for Obama. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pushcart Prize. She is a professor of English at Hunter College, where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program.