Jessica Beard is a 6th year doctoral candidate in Literature at UCSC. She is currently writing a dissertation on the complicated Emily Dickinson archive that will include a final chapter proposing and creating a digital edition of a small grouping of her poems. She co-organizes the Poetry and Politics research cluster at UCSC which brings contemporary poets and scholars together for reading groups, poetry readings, conferences and workshops. When she is not listening to records in her room or writing her dissertation in San Francisco, she waits for baseball season to start and teaches creative writing, composition and literature courses at UCSC.