Considered by many to be the spiritual mother of American poetry, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was one of the most prolific and innovative poets of her era. Well-known for her reclusive personal life in Amherst, Massachusetts, her distinctively short lines, and eccentric approach to punctuation and capitalization, she completed over seventeen hundred poems in her short life. Though fewer than a dozen of her poems were actually published during her lifetime, she is still one of the most widely read poets in the English language.

Brenda Hillman is the author of over ten poetry collections including Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Practical Water, and Pieces of Air in the Epic. She contributed to numerous anthologies and edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood and The Pocket Emily Dickinson.

Born in Arizona, Hillman is a graduate of both Pomona College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and more. Her 1993 collection Bright Existence was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.