Martha Ackmann, author of These Fevered Days, Curveball, and The Mercury 13, writes about women who have changed America. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Ackmann taught a popular seminar on Dickinson at Mount Holyoke College and lives in western Massachusetts.
For those intrigued by Emily Dickinson's elusive interior life, gifted storyteller Martha Ackmann deciphers with fresh and compelling insights ten transformational moments in the development of the poet's mind. These Fevered Days invites us into the experiences that led Dickinson to assert her ambitions as an artist and decisions as a poet with a vivid immediacy rare among biographical works. -- Jane Wald, executive director, Emily Dickinson Museum Martha Ackmann's These Fevered Days is a contemplative, sometimes lyrical effort to unlock several of the most important moments of Emily Dickinson's mysterious life. The book brings readers deeply into Emily's world: the sights she sees from the window of her room, the people with whom she corresponds, the sounds of daily life on the streets of nineteenth-century Amherst. Weaving together numerous sources...Ackmann's narrative provides thoughtful insights into both the poet and her craft. -- Julie Dobrow, author of After Emily Using an ingenious device to capture the whole of Emily Dickinson's life by presenting it in ten distinct tableaux, Martha Ackmann illuminates the poet from her first word as a toddler, 'music,' to her final written ones, 'called back.' In These Fevered Days, the author describes a gift from Dickinson to a friend as 'exquisite, tender, and intimate,' words that aptly describe Ackmann's latest triumph. -- Madeleine Blais, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of To the New Owners