Mira Bartók, Carolina Ebeid, Erinrose Mager, Emily Pettit, Andrea Rexilius, Mary Ruefle, Bianca Stone, Khadijah Queen

In this paper doll book there is no paper doll.  We dare not make a doll of Emily Dickinson. We do dare to explore with wonder and whimsy and affection and admiration and intrigue and inspiration – Emily Dickinson's iconic white dress. 

A little about the history of the dress can be found by you if you go looking. There’s information about the dress materials – a cotton fabric, mother-of-pearl buttons. There is information about why and when someone might wear a dress of this style. There is information about when Emily Dickinson began dressing in this dress. There are ideas and theories and speculations about why Emily Dickinson might have chosen to wear this dress for the time that she wore this dress. There is information about the pocket. 

Here eight artists have made their own version of this dress for you. Each dress appears twice and on the verso page you will find each dress has small tabs should you like to cut it out. Once you cut out a dress may it bring you somewhere interesting and may you bring it somewhere interesting. Perhaps it belongs by favorite books or in a window. Perhaps it goes along on a walk to see a tree or find a bee or a bird. Perhaps it sits on top of a painting or a picture by you or not by you. What we hope is that each dress finds a way to say something to you, to bring about some new perspective, to tell it slant. 

Mira Bartók is the author/illustrator of The Memory Palace, a New York Times bestselling memoir and winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She has also written and illustrated 32 books for children, including The Wonderling: Songcatcher, published by Candlewick Press and The Wonderling: Singing Tree, forthcoming in 2024. A major motion picture of The Wonderling is currently in development. Meanwhile, Mira is slowly working on My Brain is a Beautiful Country, a graphic memoir about wonder, objects, and synesthesia.

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts. Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.  A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary.

Erinrose Mager's work appears in Prelude, DIAGRAM, jubilat, Fence, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature and 2020-21 Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver where she received her PhD in Literary Arts. She teaches at The Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn.

Emily Pettit is an artist and poet living in Massachusetts. She is the author of the poetry collections, Blue Flame and Goat In The Snow. 

Andrea Rexilius is the author of: Sister Urn (Sidebrow, 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010), and Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020). She earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2010). Andrea is the Program Director for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. 

Mary Ruefle is a poet, essayist and erasure artist whose work has been awarded the William Carlos Williams Award, and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and LA Times Book Prize, and long-listed for the National Book Award and National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her erasures, exhibited in museums and galleries are treatments of nineteenth century texts. She's also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! Wave Books has published six of her poetry collections, mostly recently The Book (2023). She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and has served as Vermont's poet laureate. Her poems have earned the Robert Creeley Award, an Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Whiting Award.

Bianca Stone is author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014), and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. She lives in Vermont, where she is Creative Director at the Ruth Stone House. 

Khadijah Queen is the author of six books of poetry and hybrid prose. Ekphrastic works include the poem “Collage, unfinished,” commissioned in honor of Jasper Johns’ Mind/Mirror exhibition at Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in 2021; the chapbook Exercises in Painting (Bloof 2016); and Fearful Beloved (Argos 2015), partially written as part of Ann Hamilton’s event of a thread installation at Park Avenue Armory. Her book of literary theory and criticism, Radical Poetics, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in 2024. She makes drawings, paintings, and collages for fun.