{:MetaTitleOverride}

With verse many can recite “Because I could not stop for Death” Emily Dickinson was no stranger to poetic contemplation about the end of life. As a renowned poet and a leading feminist literary critic, Sandra M. Gilbert too is intimately familiar with grief, having edited anthologies and dedicated collections to poetry exploring it. She explores grief and our obsession with death for the annual Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute reading. Gilbert has published numerous collections of poetry, including the Patterson Prize winning Ghost Volcano and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969–1999, which won an American Book Award in 2000. Recent collections include Belongings and Aftermath: Poems. Gilbert’s other work includes Inventions of Farewell, an anthology of elegies which she edited, and Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, a cultural and literary history of grief.

With scholar Susan Gubar, Gilbert co-wrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, considered one of the most influential works of feminist scholarship of the 20th century.