The Sylvia Plath Society is hosting an online conference, "Sylvia Plath Across the Century",  on Friday-Saturday, 11-12 March 2022. Click here for registration information . This is, naturally, terrifically exciting, and features a very international collection of speakers. Below is the schedule. Please note all times are posted in GMT. And thanks must go to Dorka Tamás, Julie Irigaray, Kitty Shaw for organizing this event. Day 1: 11 March 2022 9.45-10.00 Welcome to the conference! Dorka Tamás, Julie Irigaray, Kitty Shaw Breakout Room A: 10.00-11.30 -- Food and femininity Chair: Sarah-Jane Burton 1. Sabine Verlie Kildea: Plath, Food, and the Body: Unravelling Plath's complex relationship between food and femininity 2. Eilish Mulholland: "Whole as a Pie": Domesticity and Dining in The Bell Jar and Beyond Breakout Room B: 10.00-11.30 -- Influences and Imagination Chair: Kitty Shaw 1. Lana Chryssavgis: Spaces, bodies, and impersonal subjectivities: A re...

2020 started off with an absolute Sylvia Plath bang with the news that Emory University purchased the Harriet Rosenstein papers related to Sylvia Plath. A few of us knew about it in late 2019, but when the collection would open for research was unclear. Well, they were opened up first thing . I hired Emily Banks, a graduate student at Emory, to take photographs of the papers. Throughout January and into very early February, Emily sent me daily files and it was kind of a mad flurry new information. It resulted in a streak of blog posts that I hope conveyed what it was like for me to read the files and try to process all the information. The best way to see these posts would be to look at the January and, respectively, February blog archives.  There are other blog posts in there, too. For example, I was privileged to join Janet Badia, Heather Clark, and Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick in Seattle for an MLA conference panel on Plath studies and Assia Wevill. It was great fun, though o...

On Saturday, 25 July 2020, Gail Crowther and I hosted our third and final Sylvia Plath Zoomposium. The featured speakers were: Janet Badia, Marsha Bryant, Emmeline Downie, Olivia Foster, Gillian Groszewski, Natalie Hurt, Craig Johnson, Jeremy Lowenthal, and Laura McKenzie. We are proud to announce that the recording is now available on the Sylvia Plath Info YouTube Channel . Please note Gillian Groszewski's presentation was removed. We are grateful to all thirty total speakers for their generosity and willingness to prepare talks on such short notice, to help feel a sense of community during a strange period in our lives. And thank you, of course, to all the people that registered for and attended the events. All links accessed 28 July and 1 August 2020.

The Sylvia Plath Zoomposium III, to be held Saturday, 25 July 2020, will start at 10 am NY Time (3 PM London time). Gail Crowther and I thank you all so much for registering and for your attention throughout the hours you will spend in front of your computer or other device. The interest in these Zoom events has been so wonderful. Very warm. The following shows the order of speakers. As with the first two Zomposiums, we will plan to start at 10 am EDT/3PM BST sharp and proceed straight through each speaker with no breaks. The order of the speakers will be alphabetical by last name, so: Janet Badia, Marsha Bryant, Emmeline Downie, Olivia Foster, Gillian Groszewski, Natalie Hurt, Craig Johnson, Jeremy Lowenthal, and Laura McKenzie. Interested in the event? Click here to see registration information . All links accessed 21 July 2020.

Gail Crowther and I are doing it again! We are very excited to announce The Sylvia Plath Zoomposium III has been scheduled. We have another line-up of quality international presenters who will all speak on a variety of topics. We are thrilled so many people have an interest in speaking about their research on Sylvia Plath. The event will be held on Zoom, again. The details: Date: Saturday, 25 July 2020. Starting time: 10 am EDT/3 pm BST. Registration for the event will be required. Click Here To Register! The presenters, listed here in alphabetical order, are: Janet Badia (US) Marsha Bryant (US) Emmeline Downie (UK) Olivia Foster (UK) Gillian Groszewski (IE) Natalie Hurt (UK) Craig Johnson (UK) Jeremy Lowenthal (US) Laura McKenzie (UK) All links accessed 22 June and 1 July 2020.

The Sylvia Plath Zoomposium I is next Saturday, 30 May 2020. The start time is 10 AM NYC time, 3 PM if you are in London. Outside of those two time zones, we shall leave it to you to sort it out! We wanted to post the schedule so that you can budget your time accordingly, though we naturally hope all will be present for the entire event. Thank you all for registering, the link to the event is in your confirmation email. And thank you for your patience, too, with the technology. It is our honest endeavor to have a fun, warm few hours together listening to some of the most interesting scholarship on Sylvia Plath. The following shows the order of the speakers and the expected start time for each. However, we are going one after the next and plan only to be ahead of schedule, not behind. Mona Arshi: 10:05-10:20/15:05-15:20 Heather Clark: 10:25-10:40/15:25-15:40 Sarah Corbett: 10:45-11:00/15:45-16:00 Amanda Golden: 11:05-11:20/16:05-16:20 Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick: 11:25-11:40/...

Well, things have been kind of crazy for the last six weeks or so. With the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956  in the UK and the US, and then participating in one event , following other events, looking for reviews, etc. it is not hard to imagine why! But I wanted to give a general update at this point in time on a few things. First up, those reviews: I have started to list review of the Letters on my website for Sylvia Plath,  A celebration, this is . in the " Reviews of works by Sylvia Plath " page. This will be updated as I learn of reviews. The good people at Faber and HarperCollins have sent several to me which is wonderful. If you know of any not list please do let me know about it. I do not read them all but it will be helpful I think to have them tracked. In August and September I did three posts on "The Education of Sylvia Plath", looking at her courses and writings for each academic year: 1950-1951 , 1951-1952 , and 195...

Here are some interesting links from the last week or so. Additionally, some information on the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Smith College, on 25 and 26 April. Molly Durham at the Emory Wheel reviews the current exhibit at Emory University, "Democratic Vistas: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library." Part of the collection includes Anne Sexton's copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel . The Seattle Post Intelligencer also reports . The New York Times also reviews the exhibit, which includes a slide show. There are two images of Ariel included. The Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Smith College is in two short weeks. Judith Kroll, author of Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath is a recent addition to the speakers list. Aubrey Menard, the co-ordinator and also a presenter, informs that Kroll will discuss "her relationship with Aurelia Plath and read some letters that Aurelia wrote to her." The website for the Symposium can be ...

Aubrey Menard, the organizer of the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at Smith College, recently informed me that the website for the event , to be held on 25-26 April 2007, is now online. There may be changes as the co-ordinating continues, so please check back often for further updates to the schedule. There is a great line-up of speakers giving papers, many of which I did not get to sit in on at Oxford, as well as some of Plath's friends from high school and college scheduled to attend.

2007 review 2007 marked the 75th anniversary of Plath's birth, and it was an interesting and exciting year for the late poet. Several books were published, including three unique compilations of essays and a work of biographical poems. One book, Linda Wagner-Martin's Sylvia Plath's Poetry , was delayed for various reasons, disappointing many, including myself. The book is now scheduled for release on 7 August 2008. Books about Sylvia Plath that were published this year include: The Unraveling Archive: essays on Sylvia Plath edited by Anita Helle Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual edited by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's rival and Ted Hughes's doomed love by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren Chapters in a mythology: the poetry of Sylvia Plath by Judith Kroll Sylvia Plath (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) edited by Harold Bloom Your own, Sylvia: a verse portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill Le...

For any Swedish readers of Sylvia Plath, Symposium panelist Annika J. Hagström (Saturday afternoon session on Images and Viewers of Plath, paper title "Stasis in Darkness: Sylvia Plath as a Fictive Character") recently published this article in the Helsingborgs Dagblad .

The Sylvia Plath 75 th Year Symposium featured several extra-curricular events for delegates and attendees. Each night during the symposium, Elisabeth Gray performed the one woman play Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. I had the opportunity to see the play Friday night, which featured a lively but curtailed introduction by Dr. Barbara Mossberg , of California State University at Monterrey Bay. The play itself is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Alexander’s Edge, whereas Edge takes place in the last day/night of Plath’s life, Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath takes place in the last ten minutes of her life. Gray’s character is Esther Greenwood, and the play starts with her head in an oven. In fact, when you enter the theatre, she’s already there. What followed was an emotional adventure. Alternating between deeply funny and tear-inducing sad, Gray hallucinates her way through a re-creation of events. She converses with her oven in a voice ripped off from the teacher in Charlie Brown, “ waa - waa whaa -...

Al. Alvarez and Sally Bayley engaged in a long talk about Alvarez’s friendship with Plath and Hughes. The conversation stayed mostly on the former, despite the opportunity for a longer friendship with the latter. Alvarez started by explaining his role and presence at the Symposium. He asked Sally, when approached, if he was to be a participant or an exhibition! Laughter rolled through the audience. Alvarez read Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, discussing as he did in Voices and Visions how the poem shows two voices, both vying for supremacy. Ultimately, Plath’s true poetic voice triumphed, evidenced in lines such as “I simply cannot see where there is to get to.” On this transformation of Plath’s voice, Alvarez says, “She said fuck it! To hell with all this English gentility.” He also commented that there is “much more life in Plath’s writing about death… There is energy…” Alvarez was quite candid. At one point his train of thought derailed, so he turned to Sally and questioned...

This morning commenced with an informal morning forum on Sylvia Plath websites, led by me. As the crowd was slow to assemble, I held off on my memorial for the late Sylvia Plath Forum moderated Elaine Connell. I discussed three Sylvia Plath web sites, highlighting each websites focus. Anja Beckmann’s www.sylviaplath.de , Elaine Connell’s www.sylviaplathforum , and my own www.sylviaplath.info received some attention. I included slides details some of the towns, cities, states, and countries that I’ve traveled to in order capture physical locations in film of places where Plath lived or places about which she wrote. For the concluding twenty minutes, several audience members and I got into a small dialogue about Plath websites in general, and I showed a slide show of photographs and book covers that seemed, I think, to entertain. I was so pleased to have had this opportunity to discuss my contribution to Plath’s presence on the web, and am thankful for the feedback received through...

Day three at the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium is done; it was the biggest day on the schedule in terms of featured and guest speakers in included a very big surprise guest. The morning started with an informal forum on the Plath archives at Smith College, the Lilly Library (Indiana University) and Emory University. Karen Kukil discussed the holdings at Smith, and discussed the differences in their holdings from that of IU or Emory. She also discussed how the archives each came to hold separate, though obviously complimentary collections. The first round of featured speakers after this forum was Karen Kukil and Robin Peel. Karen’s talk was "Sylvia Plath’s Women and Poetry"; she discussed Plath’s association through the years with women such as Marianne Moore, Lynn Lawner, Elizabeth Bishop, Judith Jones (her editor at Knopf), Assia Wevill, Frieda Hughes, and Anne Sexton. Her paper drew from the collections at Smith, University of Texas at Austin, the Massachusetts Historica...

The morning started with an informal, optional forum of a new journal called Plath Profiles, conceived by Prof. Bill Buckley of IU Northwest. The journal, which will be online and in print, though in print less frequently, will feature a variety of content ranging from standard academic essays to note and reactions to single poems or groups of poems, to interdisciplinary thoughts to Plath’s work. And much, much more. A second part to the Forum will take place today, to further brainstorm. Following this, Lynda K. Bundtzen and Tim Kendall presented on very interesting subjects. Bundtzen’s paper “Confession, Contrition, and Concealment in Ted Hughes’s Howls and Whispers”; which is a chapter, or part of a chapter of a longer work on Hughes. Howls and Whispers, for those who do not know, is a small, eleven poem collection printed in limited numbers (110) and intended for ownership by rare book rooms, special collections, or very wealthy private owners. They are poems written in a sim...

The new edition of Judith Kroll's Chapters in a mythology: The poetry of Sylvia Plath published by Sutton Publishing is available at the Symposium.

The morning commenced with an opening by Barbara Mossberg. It was a passionate address welcoming all to the event, commenting on Plath’s continued, yet, rising importance internationally as a vital 20th century poet, re-made and re-evaluated, in a sense, in the 21st century. The first session I attended was the literary panel “Plath, Sexton, and the Literary Market”. The panelists were Luke Ferretter, Jo Gill, and Melanie Waters. Ferretter discussed Plath’s short fiction in relation to the Ladies’ Home Journal and other magazines for women. In particular, he talked about her short stories “In the Mountains” and its successor “The Christmas Heart”, which is held at the Lilly Library. Other stories discussed were “Platinum Summer” and “The Smokey Blue Piano”, unpublished stories also held by the Lilly. The stories and articles that ran in the Ladies’ Home Journal were a focus, as was Plath’s mistaken belief of thinking her stories were LHJ material. Jo Gill discussed, for the mos...

Coming to you live from Oxford, a gray day here, with a chilly raw wind. The schedule for the Sylvia Plath Symposium was updated Monday as I flew to England. The picture to the right is from the Oxford University Press bookshop. Unfortunately, Diane Middlebrook is a late subtraction to the Sunday schedule. I was able to buy a copy of Eye rhymes: Sylvia Plath's art of the visual from a bookshop in London. I have not have much time to read it, but a glance through the pages was very rewarding in an of itself. My cursory review and feeling beat my expectations; the reproductions alone of Plath's art work knocked me out. The essays by Kathleen Connors, Diane Middlebrook, Fan Jinghua, Langdon Hammer, Sally Bayley, Christina Britzolakis, and an Afterword by Susan Gubar can only add to the books value and importance to Plath scholarship. Throughout the Symposium I will try to post impressions, reviews of sessions I attend, photographs, details of Plathian fist fights and pub crawls an...

From www.booktrade.info Press Release: Events Oxford Marks 75 Years Of Sylvia Plath Posted at 8:50AM Monday 22 Oct 2007 'Creative Process and Product,' a Symposium to mark 75 years since the birth of the poet Sylvia Plath will be held at Oxford University from 25 to 29 October and will bring together scholars, writers, artists and actors to explore the full range of Plath's work. The Symposium will include readings from Plath's poetry by some of Britain's leading actors, including Diana Quick, Emilia Fox, Susannah Harker and Tom Hollander at a Gala event on Sunday 28 October. The Symposium will provide the opportunity to discuss new Oxford research on Sylvia Plath, Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual by Sally Bayley and Kathleen Connors reassesses Plath's juvenilia and role as a visual artist. The book aims to make these aspects of her life known beyond academia and explores the links between different forms of art. There will be an exhibition in th...