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!
This workshop is for all writers to explore the meaningful relationship between protest and power. With the rise of protests in today’s society, writers can use their craft as a tool of resistance and collective action. This diverse panel with Black, Puerto Rican, activist writers and professors of literature in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will share helpful writing strategies and prompts for writers to incorporate protest into their writing and daily craft practices. Through a series of prompts and sample poems, the audience will leave the workshop with at least one draft of a new poem.About the presenters
Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award, Eric Hoffer Award, Whirling Prize, and Da Vinci Eye Award, reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and recommended by Ms. Magazine. She is a Poetry Editor at The Hopper and Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She has received support from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and SWWIM.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home, Kinds of Grace, Neon Steel, and VERSUS. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo, and Sundress. Her work is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and must-read by Elle, Bookshop, and Latinx in Publishing. She is a fiction editor at Pleiades and an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
