Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas with Dr Amanda Golden & Dr Sin Round

Join us for a talk and discussion about Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas with Dr Amanda Golden and Dr Sin round. As an undergraduate at Smith College, Sylvia Plath called Dylan Thomas her favorite modern poet (Letters v.1, 709). Plath studied Thomas in college, heard him read in 1953, and later taught his poems as a first-year English instructor at Smith in 1958. By examining marginalia in Plaths personal library and her notes for teaching Thomass poetry, this talk will offer new insights into Thomass influence on her poetry.
Following Dr Goldens presentation, she and Dr Sin Round, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, Swansea University, will discuss Plath and Thomas, particularly in light of the publication of The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber, May 2026), co-edited by Golden and Karen V. Kukil. The Poems of Sylvia Plath is the definitive edition of the poets work for scholars, students, and general readers. Plaths first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition.
Dr Amanda Golden is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology. She is the 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 OBrien, and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016). She co-edited The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a new, scholarly, annotated edition of Sylvia Plaths Collected Poems, with Karen V. Kukil (Faber and Faber, May 2026).