The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group meets monthly, September through May, for lively conversation about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters. The Poetry Discussion Group meets at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, on the second floor of Amherst College’s Frost Library. Participants should proceed directly to the Library and do not need to stop at the Museum. While no RSVP is required, participants are invited to email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org to receive a list of poems for discussion. Attendees are welcome to bring a bag lunch. Beverages and a sweet snack are provided.

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.

Sign up for our e-newsletter for announcements about the 2023 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

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, which runs each September, 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. 

The full 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 online reading of all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

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 Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith, Tiana Clark, Sumita Chakraborty, Tess Taylor, Franny Choi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paisley Rekdal, Adrian Matejka, Kaveh Akbar, and Shayla Lawson. 

The Festival programs are hybrid with events happening online, as well as in-person at the Museum.

Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Festival events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of this beloved annual event. All gifts are tax deductible and will be recognized as part of the Festival.

View Past Festival Schedules:

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

2021 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

2020 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival 

2019 Amherst Poetry Festival

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday.

Join us for our September reading by three Pioneer Valley authors with new books this year. Crater & Tower (Duck Lake Books) by Cheryl J. Fish is a collection of poetry of inspired research and engaged imagination that centers on the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens and 9/11.  Kathryn Holzman’s historical novel, Real Estate (Propertius Press) is a fascinating account of the rise of Silicon Valley. Eileen P. Kennedy’s poetry collection, Touch My Head Softly (Finishing Line Press) sensitively explores the anguish of dying of Alzheimer’s disease for both the victim and the partner.

This program is free to attend. Registration is required. To sign-up and receive the link, click here.

Our September featured writers are:

Kathryn Holzman: After attending Stanford University and NYU, Kathryn Holzman chose Health Care Administration as a career, working with public inebriates, dentists, urologists, and cardiologists. When the right side of her brain rebelled against endless databases and balance sheets, she returned to her first passion—fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in over twenty online literary magazines and print anthologies. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Flatlanders (Shire Press, 2019) Her first novel Real Estate is being published by Propertius Press in Fall, 2020. She was awarded the Grand Prize  in the 2020 Eyelands International Short Story Contest. Links to her work can be found at kathrynholzman.com.

Cheryl J. Fish:  Cheryl J. Fish’s new poetry book Crater & Tower (Duck Lake Books), examines trauma, natural and man-made disaster at Mount St. Helens Volcano and The World Trade Center after the 9-11 attack. Fish is also the author of Make It Funny, Make it Last (#171, Belladonna Chaplets) and her poetry has appeared in the recent ecopoetics anthology: Poetics for the more-than-human-world. Her fiction was featured in Liars League NYC, Iron Horse Literary Review, and her first novel, Off the Yoga Mat, about three characters turning age 40 during Y2K, will be published by Livingston Press in 2022. She was a visiting professor at Mt. Holyoke College, and is a professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York.  

Eileen P. Kennedy: Eileen P. Kennedy is a poet and academic who has focused on the writing process. Her former partner died of Alzheimer’s Disease in his 60’s and this new collection, Touch My Head Softly (Finishing Line Press), is based on those experiences.  Her first book, Banshees (Flutter Press, 2015) was nominated for a Pushcart and awarded Second Prize from the Wordwrite Books Award in Poetry. She holds a doctorate in language and literacy and has published a textbook, fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she canoes, hikes, and writes. She winters in Costa Rica.  More at www.EileenPKennedy.com.

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday.

This program is free to attend. Registration is required, click here to receive the link.

In July we feature three Pioneer Valley poets:

Michael Mercurio lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he is also a member of the steering committee for the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival (formerly Amherst Poetry Festival.) Michael’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Sugar House Review, Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, and Indianapolis Review, and his criticism has been published by The Lily Poetry Review. Find him online at poetmercurio.com.

Hannah Larrabee‘s collection, Wonder Tissue, won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and is in the running for a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award. She has a new chapbook of epistolary poems to Teilhard de Chardin out from Nixes Mate Press. Hannah’s written poetry for the James Webb Space Telescope program at NASA, and she’ll be sailing around Svalbard in the arctic circle with artists and scientists later this fall. She has an MFA from the University of New Hampshire where she studied with Charles Simic. For more information visit www.hannahlarrabee.com

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers.  His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, and The Critical Flame.  He teaches at Hampshire College. For more information visit www.nathanmcclain.com.

This program has been cancelled due to the pandemic. You might be interested in this remote program with master gardener and author Marta McDowell. 

Celebrate the beauty of spring during Garden Days at the Emily Dickinson Museum! 

As warmer temperatures arrive in Amherst, Emily’s garden begs to be tended. Join our 2018 Gardener-in-Residence Marta McDowell and a group of volunteers to aid in the cultivation and growth of the historic Dickinson family landscape. You do not need to be an expert gardener for this “all levels” program. Learn from volunteers who have tended the gardens in the past and become part of a new generation of caretakers for this precious piece of land. During Garden Days, visitors to the Museum can tend the historic landscape, discuss nature poetry under the great white oak tree, learn about the ongoing archaeological work, and enjoy gatherings in the garden all weekend long.

To register for this free program and receive the link, click here.

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday.

In June we feature poems from Poetry In The Pandemic, a crowd-sourced poetry project organized by Haoran Tong. The reading will feature staff, students, and faculty of Amherst College, and will last approximately 40 minutes. This program is dedicated to graduating seniors everywhere, but especially to the Museum’s two graduating student employees, Anna Plummer and Jane Bragdon.

This month’s readers are:

Eliza Brewer: Eliza is a poet and essayist from Houston, Texas studying English and Philosophy at Amherst. Her work has appeared in Circus, Outrageous Fortune, Polaris, The Allegheny Review, and Glass Mountain. She is a big sister to four siblings who are her inspiration and purpose.

Kalidas Shanti: Kalidas ‘22 is a poet majoring English and Math. He is currently engaged in a couple personal writing projects. The first is a collection of poems written in response to being in quarantine. All of the poems are written in iMessage to his partner as a way of maintaining intimacy while being in a long-distance relationship. The other is an expansion of a past project.

Brenna Macaray: Brenna ‘21 is an artist and poet currently majoring in English at Amherst College. She works as the Design Librarian for the Thester and Dance Dept., and at the Emily Dickinson Museum since 2018 as a museum assistant and tour guide, an opportunity for which she is ever grateful. She’s also currently working on her creative thesis in poetry, a lyric essay revolving in part around Dickinson.

Kiera Alventosa: Kiera ‘21 is a poet and writer from Long Island, New York, studying English and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. She is the Editor in Chief of The Indicator magazine and her work has also appeared in Circus. She is a recipient of the 2020 Academy of American Poets prize. She strives to write about nature with an environmental activism and justice perspective.

Anna Plummer: Anna has just graduated from Amherst College, where she majored in English and Theater & Dance. In a world with 32 hour days, she would have majored in History, too. She is a proud member of the Emily Dickinson Museum community, where she has worked as tour guide and museum assistant for five years. Anna has also studied literature and poetry writing in Bath, England. 

Haoran Tong: (see below)

About the project:

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, socialize, and communicate with nature. Ever since the outbreak, stay-at-home measures have been imposed to protect the vulnerable community for the sake of public health. Faces are masked, interactions are distanced, routines are interrupted. In the process of containing the virus, hope emerges from the darkness as the curves flatten, thanks to the heroic essential workers and generous community members. However, many people also suffer from shocking news, lost lives, and fractured families. 

Amidst uncertainty and anxiety, poetry brings us hope, inspiration, and reflection. If the consoling and unifying power of poetry is forgotten in ordinary times, it is becoming ever more influential and desirable in trying times. On Instagram, reading a poem per day has become a cure for boredom and loneliness. When we read and write poetry, we do so to understand and connect with each other. Poetry reminds us of our inner qualities of empathy, unity, and freedom. 

To encourage the members of the Amherst community to lead a poetic life and overcome the difficult circumstances, Haoran Tong ‘23 creates a platform of poetry reading and writing. Alumni, faculty, staff, students, and families of Amherst College share their thoughts and expressions with others by submitting poems they have read or written during the pandemic. They may also provide a brief explanation of how they resonate with the poems in the context of the pandemic.”

About Haoran Tong:

Haoran Tong ’23, the organizer of the “Poetry in the Pandemic” project, is a first-year student at Amherst College, MA. His poetic journey started at the age of 4 in Beijing, China, where he was born and bred. He enjoys the works of Emily Dickinson, Du Fu, William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Adunis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Xi Chuan. He was awarded the Youth Poet Laureate of China in 2017. As a member of the Poets Unite Worldwide Association, he wants to promote intercultural exchange by exploring the possibilities of poetic form and expression. Besides poetry, he is a lover of choral singing, physics, and comparative legal studies.

Daisies at Dickinson’s grave

This program will be offered remotely! See below for more information on how to participate.

Join us for a beloved annual tradition: The Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk! This event honors the 134th anniversary of the poet’s death with readings of her poetry at historic sites around Amherst. To pay homage to Dickinson’s role in inspiring a new generation of writers, we will also be sharing original poems and thoughts written as part of ‘The World Writes Back: Postcards to Emily Dickinson’ project in December 2019. 

The World Writes Back, an installation of postcards to Emily Dickinson from around the world, was on display in the Homestead during December 2019.

This program is free and open to all. We will host this remote event on Zoom where you will see historical and contemporary images of each “stop” on the walk, and images of postcards. This is a participatory event! Those who wish to read should indicate this on their event registration form. Reading assignments will be made on a first-come, first-served basis. The final “stop” is Dickinson’s grave in West Cemetery where we will offer final thoughts and a light-hearted virtual toast! Those who wish to do so, may submit a brief toast or remarks to the host to be shared at the conclusion of the “walk.”

To join the walk click this link at 12 p.m. (EST) on May 15, 2020

Enjoy a recording of this program:

The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group meets monthly, September through May, for lively conversation about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters. Each session is facilitated by a guest leader.
Join us for a remote zoom discussion from 12pm to 1:30pm on Friday, May 22. 

Topic: Emily Dickinson and the Mind

Poetry, for Emily Dickinson, is invested with inconceivable possibilities of signification. She reveled in the ecstatic “Madness” of meanings, since, to her, “Much Madness is divinest Sense.”Her forte is to transform the material to the metaphorical, and to question the notion of ‘reality’ as it is conventionally understood.

This session will feature Dickinson and philosophy, spanning her mental philosophy textbooks to parallels between her poetry and the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant. Dickinson was, like Kant, intrigued with the relation between subject and object, and fascinated with the ‘transcendent’—that goes beyond the boundaries of empirical evidence. Together we will delve into Dickinson’s writing in a way that will allow us to critically appreciate the transcendental depth and autonomy of the poet’s mind.

 Leader: Mousumi Banerjee
Dr. Mousumi Banerjee is an engaged practitioner of the language and its varied manifestations in literature with a flair for research in poetry, the multiple hermeneutic possibilities of which caused her to look at women’s writing and authorial anxiety in her doctoral study that she pursued from Jadavpur University. The voices of women poets from those intellectual edges, that are hitherto identified as the ‘margins’ of literary writing, became the site of her inquiry which led her to publish considerably on the works of supposedly non-canonical women writers. Philosophical writings also enchant her and she looks forward to working on the textuality of such works by various Western thinkers across traditions of thought and practice. She is a passionate teacher in literature and contemporary theory, singer and music enthusiast, and loves to engage in deliberations on other humanistic discourses, in general, and on Emily Dickinson, in particular! She has authored books, named Writing across Genres: Indian Literature, Language and Culture (2015), Daring to Write: The Two Creative Daughters of Victorian England (2015), and Emily Dickinson: Writing as a Woman (2017), and currently has two on-going book-length projects: one on Gitanjali: An Exalted Manifestation of Buddhist Aesthetics, and the other on ‘A thought went up my mind today –’: An Inquiry into a Post-Kantian Transcendental Philosophy in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. She has been awarded with the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2019-2020 by the United States- India Education Foundation (USIEF) to pursue her postdoctoral research, and presently she is associated with Amherst College for her work on the book on Dickinson. She greatly appreciates the continuous effort of the Emily Dickinson Museum not only in keeping the memory of the poet alive, but also in encouraging thought and scholarship on the poet’s spectacular poetic oeuvre so as to deeply influence our own lives. 
Registration for this event is now closed. If you have registered, we will email you by Monday, May 18 with a link and more information. Thank you for your interest in this program. If you were not able to join us this time, we hope to see you when the series resumes in September.

Monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus at the Emily Dickinson Museum celebrates contemporary art and poetry in our historic setting. In May we take this monthly event remote with readings by members of the Florence Poets Society!

Join us at 6:30PM for a remote reading from 10 members of the Florence Poets Society. The Society was founded in 2004 and publishes an annual review called Silkworm. This program will feature short readings by the following poets:  

Rosie McMahan breathes and writes and walks and gardens on the steppingstones of her life in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, trying to remember that every day is a new day.

Rich Puchalsky is a freelance librarian.

Marian Kent is the author of three poetry collections, Heart Container, SUPERPOWERS or: More Poems About Flying, and Responsive Pleading. She lives in Easthampton, MA with her family. You can follow Marian’s poetry and other missives at www.runawaysentence.com

Lanette Sweeney of South Hadley, MA, is a full-time writer thanks to her wife’s support; a published poet, fiction and essay writer; a novelist-in-progress; and a current MFA student at Western New England University.

Eileen P. Kennedy’s Banshees (Flutter Press, 2015) was nominated for a Pushcart and awarded Second Prize from the Wordwrite Books Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Touch My Head Softly is due out from Finishing Line Press in 2021. She lives in Amherst, MA with the ghost of Emily Dickinson. More at EileenPKennedy.com.

Howie Faerstein’s most recent book is Googootz (Press 53). He presently volunteers as a mentor at the Center for New Americans and is co-poetry editor of CutThroat, A Journal of the Arts.

Brooks Robards has published five volumes of poetry including On Island. She has recently been published in periodicals: Avocet, Aurorean, Plainsongs, Fulcrum and Equinox. She lives in Northampton, MA, and summers on Martha’s Vineyard.

Linda Bratcher Wlodyka of Cheshire, MA likes to think someone out there in poetry land is wowed or entertained by her poems. That is what really matters to her.

Michael Favala Goldman is a widely-published translator of Danish literature and  a jazz clarinetist.  His new book of poetry is Who has time for this? www.hammerandhorn.net

Lori Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak and Keeping Planes in the Air, all from Salmon Poetry. Two chapbooks, Inner Sky and typing with e.e. cummings, from Glass Lyre Press. She edits two journals: Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and Wordpeace.co, an online journal dedicated to social justice.

Enjoy a recording of this past program:

Posted by The Emily Dickinson Museum on Wednesday, May 20, 2020