This year’s literature conference, centered around the poetry of Emily Dickinson, will kick off with tonight’s two-act solo performance on Dickinson’s life.

Connie Clark, a playwright and actress from North Carolina, will be performing “Emily,” a play she wrote on the life of the famous poet. English professor Michael Leddy said 65 percent of the words in the play are taken from Dickinson’s writings.

English Professor David Raybin said Clark wrote the play in 1985 and has been performing it all across the United States and Europe since 1986.

Clark is “not an impersonator,” Raybin said. She is not trying to be Dickinson, she is trying to teach the audience about her life through the play, he said.

“After the performance, there is a talk-back with the audience and a reception,” Raybin said.

The performance will be at 7 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

Friday at 9 a.m., Clark will hold a poetry reading entitled “Emily Dickinson: Diviner Crowd at Home,” which is a line from one of her poems, Raybin said.

The play and the poetry reading are open to the general public. Registration for the rest of the conference begins at 8:30 a.m. Friday in the Union.

This year’s conference, which begins at 10:45 a.m., will comprise several workshops given by presenters from the English and history departments.

“They’re about Dickinson’s poetry in various ways,” Leddy said.

Leddy’s workshop will be entitled “Language and Violence in Dickinson’s Poetry.”

The workshop will cover ways in which Dickinson’s poetry violates the more conventional position of language and poetry, he said.

Although the main theme of the conference is Dickinson, one workshop will focus on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Leddy said.

Each year, the English department sponsors an EIU Literature Conference featuring a specific writer or topic.

“We’ve had conferences on Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dante,” Raybin said, as well as other American and British world writers.

The conference topics are chosen according to what high school teachers might be interested in, Raybin said, adding that next year the conference in October will be on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

This year’s event is sponsored by the English department and the Illinois Humanities Council.