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:
Where 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.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.
Join 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.
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?
Emily Dickinson is known to have written more than a thousand intimate and poetic letters in her lifetime. What fueled these correspondences, and how did these correspondences fuel Dickinson’s creative mind? In this workshop, poets Nicole Callihan, Tina Cane, Caitlin Grace McDonnell, and Zoë Ryder White will discuss the necessity and ascendancy of correspondence in their own lives and work. Panelists will consider poetry’s deep intersection of private world and public sphere, and then ask participants to do the same as they pen their own letter-poems. This generative writing—if Nerve not be denied!—will be shared.
This is a unique poetry generative writing workshop for writers of all levels. We will meditate on different ways to perceive the way food nourishes the soul, just like a poem does: through memory and survival, through gratitude, through synesthesia, through love languages and through socio-economic commentary. Join us and leave with at least one solid poem draft! 
What can poetry teach us about psychoanalysis, and the process of sharing one’s inner self with another? What can therapeutic or healing work teach us about writing poems? In this panel, two poets who have written about and undergone forms of therapy will explore the art and practice of writing about interiority and healing. We will read Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, and each presenter’s work, and explore the intersections between them.
What do acts of erasure afford a writer? How can blackout poetry be used to create community, unlock writer’s block, or clap back? The reasons for engaging in an erasure of a text can range from playful engagements with the literary canon, to political reclamations of voice and language. In this interactive workshop, we’ll be looking closely at resonant models of erasure (including Nicole Sealey, Sarah Sloat, Tracy K. Smith, and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth), and exploring the effects of different blackout poetry strategies. Participants will leave the workshop with prompts, tools of erasure, and recommended readings. Featuring Matt Donovan and Jenny George, authors of We Are Not Where We Are: an erasing of Thoreau’s Walden (Bull City Press, 2025).
Follow Emily Dickinson’s example by writing letters “to the World” in a virtual workshop with epistolary fantasy author Sylvie Cathrall. In this gentle and good-humored writing program, participants will play with letter-writing as a form of poetic and personal expression while drawing inspiration from Dickinson’s own letters. Guided freewriting sessions will be followed by opportunities for sharing and reflection. No experience necessary – open to all writers (and sometimes-writers, first-time-writers, letter-writers, and everyone else, too!). 
In Dickinson, we meet a speaker who sees Death as a kindly chauffeur and notes the flies buzzing around their deathbed. In these and other remarkable poems, Dickinson upends the heaviness of confronting our own mortality. She situates the speaker as a witness whose playfulness, wit, and sarcasm defuses the volatility of the moment – and helps renew the reader’s perspective. In this generative workshop, we turn to Dickinson and other contemporary poets who use a light hand to address tough subjects. Through readings and interactive writing exercises, participants will explore the power of this approach to inspire their own writing.