VIRTUAL WORKSHOP — streaming live for online registrants
This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2026 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!
Join us for the 14th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum!
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?About the presenters
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of PROMPT. She lives in California.
Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, and Arctic Revival, selected by Elizabeth Alexander for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry appears in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and a PhD in Creative and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review Books.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e))
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The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is sustained by the Emily Dickinson Fund, which provides critical, unrestricted support for the Museum’s day-to-day operations. Your generous donation helps us offer immersive poetry programs to a global audience and preserve the historic Dickinson legacy in Amherst. As the Fund supplies 36% of our annual budget, your tax-deductible contribution is essential to our mission. Join us in inspiring learners of all ages by making an immediate impact today.