Schedule of Activities
4:30 p.m.: Doors open, Neilson Library Browsing Room
5:00 p.m.: Lecture begins (livestreamed for pre-registered virtual guests)
6:15 p.m.: Reception, Neilson Library Skyline Room
Event Description
On November 12, the Smith College Libraries will host a hybrid lecture in the Neilson Library Browsing Room that explores The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber, 2026), a new, annotated, scholarly edition that draws extensively on the manuscripts, typescripts, and other artifacts in Smith College Special Collections. The event will feature a lecture from co-editors Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, who will discuss their work on the edition. The event also commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of About Sylvia, a book published by Plath’s friend and classmate Enid Epstein Mark (Smith 1954) for the ELM Press. Plath dedicated three poems to Enid, who generously placed the manuscripts in Special Collections; their contents were a vital contribution to The Poems of Sylvia Plath.
Faber & Faber has called The Poems of Sylvia Plath a landmark publication: the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students, and general readers. Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition. The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected, and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history.
Registration is encouraged for in-person attendees; it is required for virtual attendees. Register for the lecture here. And see the full event details here. Note: Preregistered virtual guests will receive a Zoom link via email prior to event start time.
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About the Presenter(s)
Amanda Golden is Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology and a Research Affiliate at Smith College. She has co-edited The Poems of Sylvia Plath (2026) with Karen V. Kukil, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Golden is author of Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (2020), co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022) with Anita Helle and Maeve O’Brien, and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016). She is Vice President of the Modernist Studies Association and will become President in October.
Karen V. Kukil is a Research Affiliate in English Language & Literature at Smith College. She previously curated the Sylvia Plath Collection and Virginia Woolf Papers as Associate Curator of Special Collections at Smith College from 1990 to 2020 and taught courses on editing Sylvia Plath’s correspondence and poetry for Smith’s Archives Concentration program. She is the editor of the unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath for Faber & Faber in London and Anchor Books in New York (2000) and co-editor with Peter K. Steinberg of The Letters of Sylvia Plath in two volumes for Faber & Faber and Harper Collins (2017/2018). She recently co-edited The Poems of Sylvia Plath with Amanda Golden for Faber & Faber (2026).
