REGISTER TBA
Join us for a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum.
The Emily Dickinson Museum’s annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is an event with international reach that celebrates Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy and the contemporary creativity she and her work continues to inspire from the place she called home.
This year’s line-up features a talented group of poets from around the world including a headline reading from acclaimed poet Victoria Chang with award-winning poet Krysten Hill, generative writing workshops, poetry panels, an open mic, live music, and more. The cornerstone of the Festival, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, is an epic reading of all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson’s poems across the Festival week. Learn more about the 2025 lineup below.
FESTIVAL TICKETS:
Free Festival access is available. However, registrants are encouraged to consider choosing the “Pay Your Way” ticket price of $20 per event. Revenue from Festival tickets supports honoraria for participating poets and the production costs of high-quality hybrid Festival events. Purchase 10 or more Pay Your Way tickets, and we will gift you an official Emily Dickinson Museum tote bag!
Small Group Workshops: This year, the Festival is offering three concurrent workshops for in-person participants on Sunday morning. Due to the limited event capacity, these workshops are available for a fee of $25. Tickets for small group workshops on Sunday must be purchased separately. See the Festival ticket menu.
A limited number of VIP Festival tickets are available at two levels: VIP, and VIP Dinner Guest. At both levels, these tickets offer a heightened Festival experience that includes access to all festival programs and the small group workshop of your choosing, reserved seating, a Festival swag bag, and a private reception and tour of the Homestead art installation, 'A Something Overtakes the Mind'. At the VIP Dinner Guest level, ticket holders (only six total seats available!) are invited to an intimate dinner on Saturday, September 20, in the Dickinson dining room at the Homestead with Festival headliners Terrance Hayes and Krysten Hill, and Jane Wald, the Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum.
For all tickets, donations in support of the Museum’s programming are welcome in the final step of registration. Your support is deeply appreciated.
REGISTER TBA
THE SCHEDULE:
Monday, September 21:
6-8:30pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 1
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
Tuesday, September 22:
12-2:15pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 2
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
3-4:30pm [Virtual Workshop] — Three Perspectives Three Possibilities
This workshop will offer three perspectives from Japanese literature—haiku, tanka and haibun—in connection to Emily Dickinson's poetry. Acclaimed craftswomen of these forms will share a wide range of example works including 10th-century zuihitsu, poems by a 19th-century Japanese female poet (a contemporary of Emily Dickinson), haiku based on the African American experience, as well as their own work inspired by respective examples. The audience will be given writing prompts and invited to share their works and discuss.
6:30-8pm [Virtual Panel] — Porosity of Poetry
Enjoy short readings and discussion in response to the idea that poetry acts as filter and sponge for the world to enter, reveal, and inspire. What meanings are our words saturated with, and where does that discovery lead? When do environmental, historical, and sociopolitical realities flood the page? How does the body's experience of writing impact the poetry itself? At this panel, poets Oliver Baez Bendorf, Patrycja Humienik, and Livia Meneghin will share poetry in response to these understandings of porosity and discuss living within and between language, when and how poetry can surprise us, and even where Emily Dickinson's poetry serves as example.
Wednesday, September 23:
12-2:15pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 3
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
2:30-4pm [Virtual Workshop] — 'Slow tramp the Centuries': Time Traveling with Emily Dickinson
Time travel with Emily Dickinson from her clockless childhood to eternity's carriage ride. During this generative workshop, we'll explore time's slant in Dickinson's poetics, then leap into the present to write our own time travel poems in the contemporary 'century' form — a 100-word prose poem. Using Dickinson's lines as launchpads, craft yours decade-by-decade through short timed prompts. We'll cap this with 'bursts of now': 100-second single-image sprints! Add numerical and temporal play to your poetic toolbox and leave with fresh work.
Thursday, September 24:
12-2:15pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 4, co-hosted with the Jones Library
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
3-4:30pm [Virtual Workshop] — Thank You for the Surgery: The Poet-Editor Relationship
Callie Siskel and Elizabeth Metzger, poetry co-editors at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and poet Dorothea Lasky, will use the Higginson-Dickinson correspondence to consider the role of the poet as editor or editor as poet today and rethink our assumptions about the editor. Beyond the aim of publishing our work as poets, how might we see the conversation between poet and editor today as expanding possible pathways of creativity? We often think about the relationship between poet and reader, but the special role of the poet-editor offers an intermediary process that has the opportunity to transform, elevate, or pressurize our solitary artistic visions--sometimes by offering concrete feedback, sometimes by asking us to formulate our aesthetic vision or reconsider our projects and values, and other times simply by creating space in our society for a larger conversation around poetry, life, and listening. In a poetry world in which many editors are poets themselves, and a main avenue for becoming a poet is the workshop classroom, how might the editor-poet relationship create a correspondence that is at once formative, supportive, and expansive, and a relationship that is personally and professionally meaningful and ideally non-hierarchical?
6-7:15pm [Virtual Reading] — Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Reading
Festival edition of the Museum's monthly poetry reading series. Hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.
Friday, September 25:
12-2:15pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
3-4:30pm [In-Person Workshop] — Shawl We: Swirling Poetry Patterns
In this poetry workshop, we shall visit a colorful mystery: a ten-foot shawl which belonged to a wren-size poet. Did Emily Dickinson wear this? Sitting at her window desk, looking out toward The Evergreens? Suddenly thrown about her as she wandered into the garden, visiting a robin? In bed, contemplating a wild night? After exploring some Dickinson poems which use patterns analogous to the shawl’s, participants will be invited to write lines which are inspired by the shawl’s patterns, inspired by imaginings of Dickinson wearing the shawl, or by both aspects. “Artists wrestled here!/Lo, a tint Cashmere!/Lo, a Rose!”—F11A
3-4:30pm [In-Person Workshop] — Finding Emily in a Found Poem
In this interactive, generative workshop, poets will explore the language and themes of Emily Dickinson – at a slant. To honor Dickinson’s breathtakingly odd and brilliant work, poets will create group poems in the voice of a collective ‘we’. Poets will create found poems by combining their own words with words found in poems by Emily Dickinson. Sound intimidating? It will not be, as two-time World Poetry Slam champion, Joaquín Zihuatanejo, will be there to guide us along the way.
7-8:30pm [Hybrid Performance] — Open Mic Night
Open mic night hosted by two-time World Poetry Slam champion Joaquín Zihuatanejo. Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 5 minutes each to make us feel “physically as if the top of [our] head[s] were taken off!” (Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 16 August 1870). Open mic sign-ups are handled in advance via a Google Form, and selected readers will be notified. All readers must be available to read in-person and must register for the Festival to be considered.
Saturday, September 26:
9:30am-12pm[Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 6
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this session, readers must be present on-site, but listeners are welcome both in-person and online. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Treats inspired by Dickinson's own love of baking will be served. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
1-2:30pm [In-Person Panel] — I Could Not Stop: Poetry and Persistence
January, Enzo and Amy are award-winning poets and Massachusetts Book Award honorees, but their paths to success weren't easy. All three writers are parents, wage earners, and in some cases, caregivers, with multiple community and professional connections and responsibilities. Like Dickinson, each of these poets has at times wished they could bolt the door to their room and simply be left alone with their words. This interactive panel, reading, and discussion will open the door to those conflicting demands and provide strategies — and, hopefully, inspiration—for those in a similar predicament, those who “could not stop.”
3-4pm [In-Person Workshop] — Small and Bold: Poetry of Small Objects and Narrow Spaces
Dickinson examined, studied, and utilized tiny items and tight envelope contours in the service of poem-making. This two-part workshop will discuss how the constraint of shape and size forces creativity: We will first meditate on a small, everyday object and honor it in the creation of a poem; we will then consider how restricted page space makes a poem even more expansive. Led by four apartment-dwelling Brooklynite poet-educators (including one urban planner and one visual designer), participants will make and share poems that reveal the "passing Universe" in minute ephemera and confines.
3-4pm [In-Person Workshop] — Poetry in Panels: Creating Poetry Comics
Tell it and DRAW it in slant with this poetry comics workshop. Suitable for all ages and creative inclinations, come explore poetry through short comics. Comics combine words and images, and like slant poetry, gives us new and complex ways to narrate with the world around us. Participants will learn how to develop visual images to accompany short poems and arrange them in 4 or 6 panel comics.
7-9pm [Hybrid Reading] — Headliner Night with Victoria Chang
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets will read from their work and discuss poetic practice and inspiration. A Q&A and a book-signing with the poets to follow. Books will be available for sale on site.
Sunday, September 27:
10-11:30am [In-Person Panel] — Look Again: Documentary Interventions with Visual Archives
This panel of award-winning poets of color, queer poets, and disabled poets will explore the evolving intersections of ekphrastic and documentary poetics, challenging traditional boundaries between image, language, and evidence. In a time when truth is suppressed, redacted, and revised in real time, while art, research, and scholarship is defunded, this panel of poet-educators explores ekphrastic dialogue as community practice, a multi-voiced collaboration that resists erasure. Audiences will leave with generative strategies for their creative practice, classrooms and other community spaces, inspired by expanding possibilities for this collaborative practice and the ways it can be leveraged to nourish healthy communities.
12:30-2:30pm [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Grand Finale
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this session, readers must be present on-site, but listeners are welcome both in-person and online. We will read from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Stay to the end to enjoy a celebratory slice of coconut cake inspired by Dickinson's own recipe. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
About the Festival:
The Emily Dickinson Museum's Annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is an event with international reach that celebrates Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy and the contemporary creativity she and her work continues to inspire from the place she called home.
The Festival is named for Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” underscoring the revolutionary power of poetry to shift our perspective and reveal new truths. Festival organizers are committed to featuring established and emerging poets who represent the diversity of the contemporary poetry landscape and to fostering community by placing poetry in the public sphere.
This year's line-up features workshops, panels, and readings, by a diverse and talented group of poets from around the world. The cornerstone of the Festival, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, is an epic reading of all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson's poems.
To follow along with the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, get your copy of the Franklin edition from the Emily Dickinson Museum Shop.
The annual event attracts a diverse audience of Dickinson fans and poetry lovers, including students, educators, aspiring writers, and those who are new to poetry and literary events. Past Festival headliners have included Terrance Hayes, Carl Phillips, Marilyn Nelson, Abigail Chabitnoy, Tracy K. Smith, Tiana Clark, Tess Taylor, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paisley Rekdal, Adrian Matejka, Kaveh Akbar, and Ocean Vuong.
Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:
Admission to all Poetry Festival events is free--made possible by contributions from Museum supporters.
Please consider making a donation of any size during the registration process or anytime on the Museum's website.