graphic for 195th dickinson birthday

Emily Dickinson 195th Birthday Open House
Sat., Dec. 6, 1-4:30pm ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA
This free event has limited capacity, we encourage you to register in advance.

graphic for 195th dickinson birthdayYou are cordially invited to the Emily Dickinson Museum’s celebration of the poet’s 195th birthday! On Saturday, December 6, join us in person at the Homestead and The Evergreens for a free open house with tours, crafts, music, hot cider and gingerbread cookies! 

Emily Dickinson, the middle child of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830, in the family Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, now the site of the Emily Dickinson Museum. She celebrated 55 birthdays before her death in 1886. Some of the poet’s most favored themes were time and im/mortality; she wrote, “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” (Johnson L379)

Event registration is required. Free tickets are available; Pay Your Way tickets support free programs at the Emily Dickinson Museum.

REGISTER

Can’t make it to Amherst? Join us for our virtual birthday celebration.


Give a Birthday Gift
It’s not a birthday party without gifts! If you’d like to honor Emily Dickinson on her birthday, please consider a donation to the Museum to support our free programs which are made possible with your support. Gifts of all sizes are deeply appreciated.

DONATE

 

 

Educator Workshop
Learning from Dickinson’s Letters
Wednesday, December 3, 6:30pm ET

My letter as a bee, goes laden“:
VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.

Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.

View the full educator workshop lineup.

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

graphic Educator Workshop - My letter as a bee, goes laden

Join Cristanne Miller, co-editor of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (2022), for a presentation and workshop on teaching with the poet’s letters. Over 1,000 of Dickinson’s letters have been collected–the earliest sent to her brother Austin at the age of 11 and the last written shortly before her death. This new definitive edition–the first in over 60 years–includes almost 300 previously uncollected letters and more than 200 “letter poems.” Each is newly transcribed, revealing some previous transcription errors and uncovering deliberately omitted material.

The resulting collection paints a portrait of Dickinson as witty, engaging, and deeply connected with her community as well as the literature and events of her day. The letters provide meaningful context to her poems and can also stand alone as rich primary sources. This workshop will begin with an overview of the letters and Q&A with Miller, followed by interactive activities and discussion of select letters with Museum staff.

REGISTER


Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature at University of Buffalo, emerita, where she publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and culture, including Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Harvard University Press, 1987), Reading in Time: Emily DIckinson in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2012), an edition of Dickinson’s complete poems: Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (Harvard University Press, 2016), winner of the MLA Scholarly Edition Prize and translated into Portuguese; and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell (Harvard University Press, 2024), named as a best 10 Books of the year by PBS News Hour, NPR, and the London Review of Books. Miller co-edited the 2022 Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson with Karen Sánchez-Eppler. She serves on the advisory board of the Emily Dickinson Archive, and formerly on the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

graphic Educator Workshop - Dickinson’s Gardens and Volcanoes

Educator Workshop
Dickinson’s Gardens and Volcanoes
Tuesday, November 11, 6:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.

Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.

View the full educator workshop lineup.

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

graphic Educator Workshop - Dickinson’s Gardens and Volcanoes

Join Drs. Cheryl Weaver and Wendy Tronrud, Dickinson scholars who have taught at both the secondary and post-secondary levels, for an interactive professional development workshop on two of Dickinson’s most evocative poetic landscapes–gardens and volcanoes. 

This workshop focuses on how teachers can use pre-reading strategies related to Dickinson’s historical and cultural contexts to support student readers of her poems. Beginning with an overview of how volcanoes and gardens are relevant to aspects of Dickinson’s poetry, Dr. Cheryl Weaver and Dr. Wendy Tronrud will engage participants in particular Dickinson poems, using related pre-reading strategies and introducing writing-to-learn strategies. Workshop participants will leave the session with strategies for use in or adaptable to any literature-related or humanities classrooms.

REGISTER


Wendy Tronrud is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Queens College, CUNY. She works on the intersection between education, poetry and visual arts across the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. She has published essays in Women’s Studies and ESQ in addition to art writing in The Brooklyn Rail and Camera Austria. She has recently co-edited an ESQ triple issue on Thomas Wentworth Higginson with Gerard Holmes. Currently, she is developing a book proposal on volcanoes in the nineteenth century. She is a co-chair of the Emily Dickinson International Society’s pedagogy community. 

Cheryl Weaver teaches IB Language and Literature at City Honors School in Buffalo, NY, United States. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth-century American literature, epistolary practice, and the pragmatics of postal delivery and postal history. She received the 2022 Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Fellowship in support of research related to her dissertation, “‘You know it is customary’: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Practice.” In 2023, she was awarded the  Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller Summer Research Fellowship at Historic Hudson Valley. She is a co-chair of the Emily Dickinson International Society’s pedagogy community. 

graphic Educator Workshop - The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –

Educator Workshop
Dickinson’s Planetary Poems
Wednesday, October 22, 6:30pm ET

The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –-“:
VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.

Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.

View the full educator workshop lineup.

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –

And back it slid – and I alone –
A speck upon a Ball –
Went out upon Circumference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell –

(Fr 633)

graphic Educator Workshop - The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –

Join Renée Bergland, historian of science and author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles, Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science for an interactive educator’s workshop.

During Emily Dickinson’s lifetime, the universe expanded in every direction. Developments in astronomy, geology, and biology enlarged the scales of space and time. To many, the realization that humans were a tiny part of Earth’s geological past was profoundly disturbing. Byron concluded that the planet Earth was doomed, and that the universe would end in “Darkness.” Others, including Dickinson, were more ambivalent. “I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched – ” expresses a mix of despair at the loss of the old model of the universe and excitement about the possibilities of the new sciences. Dickinson’s poems insistently pressed different frames of reference together, inviting readers to find the relationship between different ways of thinking about the universe.

In this moment of planetary environmental emergency, Dickinson’s poetry gives us a way to talk about planetary grief and ecological anxiety, while also allowing us to imagine more hopeful frames of reference. This workshop will begin with a presentation of Dickinson’s planetary poems in the context of 19th-century science, followed by a discussion of how they invite us to expand our “Circumference” today. The workshop will conclude with a discussion of classroom activities and resources.

REGISTER


Renée Bergland is a literary critic and a historian of science who teaches in the Department of Humanities at Simmons University where she is Program Director of Literature and Writing. Her most recent publication is Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton University Press, 2024). She contributed an essay, “Dickinson Emergent: Natural Philosophy and the Postdisciplinary Manifold”, to the Oxford Handbook to Emily Dickinson (2022). Bergland is writing a forthcoming general audience book examining Dickinson’s poetry as interpreted through the lens of difference sciences, including astronomy, geology, and ecology. She is a member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society. 

Tea with the Dickinsons- Tell It Slant 2025

Tea with the Dickinsons
An illustrated talk by Executive Director Jane Wald
Saturday, September 20, 3pm ET

HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum AND streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Tea with the Dickinsons- Tell It Slant 2025Introduced to the European market in the seventeenth-century, trade in tea – and subsequently in coffee and chocolate – became a means of establishing empires and generating the almost frantic consumerism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West. Emily Dickinson and her family delighted in these exotic imported beverages and, like the rest of New England, acquired the requisite material goods to make and serve tea, coffee, and chocolate in their own family circle and for their guests. This talk will explore the meanings, settings, and equipment for “taking tea” in Emily Dickinson’s world, including original family objects now in the Museum’s collection.
 
An illustrated talk by Emily Dickinson Museum Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald.
 


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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Children’s Book Covers - Tell It Slant 2025

Children’s Book Covers
Diving Boards Into Our Imagination
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM — at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA

This is a paid program. Registration is required to attend. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Children’s Book Covers - Tell It Slant 2025Beginner and experienced poets of all ages are invited to come and use children’s book covers as diving boards into memory and imagination. Children’s books will be on hand to browse, and participants will also be encouraged to search online for their own current or past favorite children’s books. Using one or more of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell & taste), participants will generate drafts of new poems as the vivid literary landscape of rhymes, illustration, and stories of childhood spark memories and new ideas.
 
María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado was born in Puerto Rico & raised in Springfield, MA, and has earned degrees in German, her third language. She writes poems that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German, & Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her latest collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (2024) & Resistencia: Resilience (2023). For 20+ years, she has been joyfully facilitating poetry workshops including at the WriteAngles Conference & Mass Poetry Festival. earned degrees in German, her third language. She writes poems that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German, & Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her latest collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (2024) & Resistencia: Resilience (2023). For 20+ years, she has been joyfully facilitating poetry workshops including at the WriteAngles Conference & Mass Poetry Festival.


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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Poems in the Garden - Tell It Slant 2025

Poems in the Garden
A Poetry Workshop with The WildStory Podcast
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM — at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA

This is a paid program. Registration is required to attend. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Poems in the Garden - Tell It Slant 2025In a time of ecological crisis and increased disconnection from nature, poets create vital space to honor and reflect upon the natural world, with its joys and its losses. In this generative workshop led by The WildStory Podcast host Ann E. Wallace and featured guest Elizabeth Sylvia, poetry and nature enthusiasts of all ages and experience levels are invited to slow down and open their senses to the natural world—the memories it holds, the meanings it carries, and the feelings it inspires. Participants will engage in writing exercises, learn new strategies, and compose a poem draft during the session.
 
Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, NJ and author of two poetry collections: Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). Wallace hosts and produces The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. A poet, memoirist, and illness advocate, she is Professor of English at New Jersey City University.
 
Elizabeth Sylvia lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English. Elizabeth’s first book, None But Witches (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has two books forthcoming: a chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Oddities from Ballerini Press in 2025 and a full-length collection Scythe, exploring Marie Antoinette and the end of the world, from River River Books in 2026.


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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Paste It Slant_ - Tell It Slant 2025

Paste It Slant
A Collage Poetry Workshop
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM — at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA

This is a paid program. Registration is required to attend. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Paste It Slant_ - Tell It Slant 2025Join us for a generative workshop that pairs the visual art form of collage with poetry! Participants will be guided through a process of discovery with different collaging materials and text to create their own hand-crafted collage. You will walk away with seeds of poems, deeper knowledge and experience with a visual art form, and a found poetry technique to help you — in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson — “tell all the truth but tell it slant “! All levels of experience with poetry and visual art are welcome.
 
Leticia Priebe Rocha is the author of In Lieu of Heartbreak, This is Like (Bottlecap Press, 2024). She earned her bachelor’s from Tufts University and was awarded the 2020 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she grew up in Miami, FL and resides in the Greater Boston area. Her work has been published in Salamander, Rattle, and elsewhere. Leticia is also an Editorial Associate for Yellow Arrow Publishing.


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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
Home in a Time of Crisis - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

Home in a Time of Crisis
New Poets from Poetry Wales
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL


Home in a Time of Crisis - Tell It Slant 2025 graphicWhere do we find home, belonging and comfort in a time of crisis? What might Emily Dickinson tell us about how to find comfort and strength when it sometimes feels like nothing we do can change things for the better? Head editor and chair Zoë Brigley presents three brilliant new editors from the magazine Poetry Wales: Kandace Siobhan Walker, Tangie Mitchell and Zakia Carpenter-Hall. These rising poetry stars will talk about where they find comfort, reading classic poems such as “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ alongside less well known Dickinson poems and their own work.
 
Zoë Brigley is a Welsh American poet, essayist, editor, and curator whose work spans poetry, translation, nonfiction, and interdisciplinary art. Her three full-length poetry collections—Hand & SkullConquest, and The Secret published by Bloodaxe—have all been named UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She received an Eric Gregory Award for outstanding British poets under 30, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and was commended by the Forward Prize. In 2025, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Ohio, and an Artist’s Project Grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Zoë is the editor of Poetry Wales. poetrywales.co.uk

Zakia Carpenter-Hall is an American writer, tutor and critic living in the UK. Her poetry reviews and poems have both been published in Poetry Wales, The Poetry Review, Wild Court, Magma and elsewhere. She’s also had multiple reviews appear in Poetry London and on the Poetry School’s website. Human Ecologies (2021) is her ecopoetry film commissioned by The Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival and Obsidian Foundation. She was the editorial intern for Magma 82 Obsidian, a former Poetry London mentee, Jerwood Bursary Recipient and London Library Emerging Writer. She has taught creative writing courses at Kingston University, Royal Holloway University of London and the Poetry School. zakiacarpenterhall.com

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee and Welsh heritage. Her work explores ideas and themes of speculative futures, anti-capitalism, popular culture, digital media, abolitionist ecologies and folk spiritualities knowledges. As a multidisciplinary artist, she works with video, painting, textiles, sound and installation. She is represented by Abi Fellows at DHH Literary Agency. She lives in London. kandace.co.uk

Tangie Mitchell is a poet, editor, and collage artist. Born and raised in North Carolina, her work centers personal and collective histories of the Black American South, among other subjects. Tangie earned a BA in Political Science from Spelman College and an MFA in Writing (Poetry) from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been featured in Poetry Wales, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, West Trade Review, Berlin Lit, Exposition Review, and more. A Watering Hole Poetry Fellow and an alum of the UK-based Obsidian Foundation, her work has also earned Best of The Net and Robert Siegel Prize nominations and has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and other arts institutions. She was a Spring 2024 Contributing Editor for Poetry Wales Issue 59.3: Home in a Time of Ecological Emergency. Tangie lives in Brooklyn with a growing collection of 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s funk/r&b/soul memorabilia. tangiemitchell.com

 


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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

 
graphic Headliner Night and Garden Party - Tell It Slant 2025

Headliner Night
with Terrance Hayes and Krysten Hill
Saturday, Sept. 20, 7pm ET

HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum AND streaming live for online registrants. Live cap

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

Headliner Night - Tell It Slant 2025 graphicJoin us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, National Book Award and MacArthur Genius grantee Terrance Hayes and award-winning poet Krysten Hill, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with moderator Nicole Callihan.

About the Poets
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, are forthcoming on Penguin in 2023. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University.

Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. She has featured poetry at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Boston Book Festival, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Blacksmith House, and other places. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series. Poetry Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency, 2024 SWWIM Residency, and Kenyon Review’s 2024 Peter Taylor Fellowship. She is currently the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Nicole Callihan has two recent poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), as well as the chapbooks Downtown, A Study in Spring, and ELSEWHERE (the latter two in collaboration with Zoë Ryder White). Nicole also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024.
 
 

 

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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule