Open Mic Night
Friday, Sept. 27, 7pm 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 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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

Open mic night hosted by poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua.
Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 5 minutes each to make us feel “physically as if the top of [our] head[s] were taken off!” (Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 16 August 1870) Featured poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua will follow the open mic. Open mic sign-ups are handled in advance via a Google Form, and selected readers will be notified. All readers must be available to read in-person and must register for the Festival to be considered.

Sign-ups for open mic readers have now closed.

About the Poets
Oliver de la Paz is the author and editor of several books and serves as the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA. His latest collection of poetry, The Diaspora Sonnets, was published by Liveright Press (2023). It was a winner of the 2023 New England Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. A founding member of Kundiman, he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
oliverdelapaz.com

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title.

diannelyantigua.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.

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Poetry Masterclass: Haunted Works/Haunted Words
with Oliver de la Paz
Friday, Sept. 27, 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 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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

From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a subject that haunts you. We will be looking at how to write and sustain work within a singular focus, obsession, or motif. This workshop introduces poems and works paired with exercises that allow the writer to be haunted by a subject, inviting writers to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that find themselves, suddenly facing the ghosts that visit them frequently. Ultimately, we will look to lines from Dickinson that declare:

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors Surpassing
Material Place—

About the Poet
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, published by Liveright Press in 2023, is long listed for the National Book Award and is the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves on the board for Poetry Daily and on the board for the Worcester County Poetry Association.
oliverdelapaz.com

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

“Bee! I’m expecting you”:
Dialogues with the Non-Human
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 7:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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

Like us, Emily Dickinson lived in a time of ecological change and painful civil conflict. Against this backdrop, Dickinson’s poems reach out to the world around her—the frog, the snake, the hummingbird, train, “slant of light,” even the “loaded gun,” addressing these others as companions, fellow witnesses. In this panel, poets Carolina Ebeid, Julia Guez, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Tess Taylor will explore both Dickinson’s and their own dialogues with the nonhuman. The poets will read poems by Dickinson in conversation with each other’s work to plumb that site in which “surpassing/Material Place—” we might instead “Dwell in Possibility.” We follow with writing prompts and conversation.

About the Poets
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet born in New Jersey to Palestinian and Cuban parents. She is the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, the chapbook Dauerwunder, and many digital experiments. She edits poetry at The Rumpus and Visible Binary, and from 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University.
carolinaebeid.com

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, and a translation fellowship from the NEA. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.
juliaguez.net

Anna V. Q. Ross is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Flutter, Kick, which won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry, and was named a 2023 Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library. The recipient of fellowships from Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she teaches creative writing at Tufts University and lives in Boston, where she raises chickens.
annaVQross.com

Tess Taylor’s body of work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Work & Days, and Rift Zone. In 2023, she published the poetry anthology: Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. She lives just outside Berkeley California.
tess-taylor.com

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

graphic Poetry, Spirituality, and New Forms of Attention - Tell It Slant 2024

Poetry, Spirituality, and New Forms of Attention:Wednesday, Sept. 25, 4:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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

Emily Dickinson’s poems interact with silence to open spaces of questioning, recognition, and keen attention to spiritual matters and questions of meaning. In this workshop, we’ll place our own poetry in the context of Dickinson’s poetry, offer a short guided meditation and generative prompts for participants to explore their own relation to silence, voice, and spiritual attention.

About the Poets

Rachel Zucker is the author The Poetics of Wrongness, SoundMachine, MOTHERs and eight other books. In addition to working as a labor doula, childbirth educator, and pearl stringer, Rachel has taught writing to people of all ages and, for the past thirteen years, to graduate and undergraduates at New York University. She is founder and host of the Commonplace podcast and directrix of The Commonplace School for Embodied Poetics.
www.commonplace.today

Nadia Colburn is the author of I Say the Sky and The High Shelf. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, is a yoga teacher, serious student of Thich Nhat Hanh and founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.
nadiacolburn.com/

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

graphic Telling Our Medical Stories Slant - Tell It Slant 2024

Telling our Medical Stories Slant
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 6:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!

In this workshop, participants will learn how to translate their personal stories of illness and disability into poetry, something Dickinson herself practiced, and something that’s employed by practitioners of Narrative/Poetic Medicine.

The workshop, led by poets whose work centers around medicine and disability (from the perspectives of physician, caregiver, and as patients themselves) will be both reflective and generative and will include the reading and discussion of a medical poem by Dickinson as well as a poem by a contemporary “medical poet.” The workshop will culminate with a generative exercise involving the translation of participants’ medical histories into poetic form.

About the Poets

Catharine Clark-Sayles is a physician who recently retired after forty years in practice. She completed her MFA in poetry and narrative medicine at Dominican University of California in 2019. Her first two books of poetry, One Breath and Lifeboat, were published by Tebot Bach Press. A chapbook, Brats, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her fourth book, The Telling, The Listening, was published by Saint Julian Press in October 2023.
clarksayles.com

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of rinky dink press, and the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates self-care and healing through poetry. She’s published three collections of poetry and was the winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapboo competition. Her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, poets.org, on local NPR affiliates, national NPR podcasts, the TEDx stage, and elsewhere. She teaches at ASU.
rdpoet.com

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

graphic Our Roots as Muse_ - Tell It Slant 2024

Our Roots as Muse:
Family & Ancestry as Creative Inspiration
Rescheduled: Monday, October 14, 6pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. Thank you for your interest!

Facilitators will lead participants in a series of generative writing exercises using personal family and ancestral history as creative inspiration and content. The workshop will allow time for writing and limited time for sharing excerpts in breakout rooms. Participants will leave the workshop with at least two writing sketches and other writing resources to continue developing their ideas and creatively archiving their own family histories.

About the Poets
Tamara J. Madison is a writer, poet, editor, and instructor currently living, working, and writing in Central
Florida. She is a MFA graduate of New England College with a focus in poetry. She is also the inaugural senior\ fellow of Anaphora Literary Arts. Her work has been reviewed and published in various journals and literary magazines including Poetry International, Cider Press Review, and World Literature Today. Her most recent full-length poetry collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus, was published by Trio House Press (2019).
www.tamarajmadison.com

.CHISARAOKWU. is a transdisciplinary poet-artist, actor and writer of Igbo descent, and a 2023 California Arts Council Artist Fellow. Her work has been honored with awards and fellowships from the MacDowell, Cave Canem Fellow, Vermont Studio Center, PERIPLUS Collective, and Anaphora Arts. She is a 2022- graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, and an alum of the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop. Nominated for Best of Net (Poetry), Best New Poets (2022), and Best New Small Fiction (2022), her essays and poetry have appeared in academic and literary journals including Transition, PANK, midnight&indigo, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
www.chisaraokwu.com

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon
September 23 – 29

VIRTUAL and HYBRID Program (see date details below)

Part of the FREE 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Come read with us and join in for the week-long Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon! An Emily Dickinson Museum tradition, the Marathon is a group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this year’s hybrid Festival, some sessions will take place in-person and others online. For the Marathon, we will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition.

Join us for the 12th annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum!

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

There are two ways to participate in each Marathon session: as a reader or as a listener.

Listeners sit back and enjoy the group reading, which beautifully blends the voices of volunteer readers coming to Dickinson from different places, times in their lives, and levels of familiarity with the Poet. Listeners can watch the Marathon online via Zoom all week long. Listeners can watch the Marathon online OR in-person during the hybrid sessions on Saturday and Sunday. To sign up as a listener, register through the main Festival page.
Readers volunteer to read 10-20 poems as part of the circle reading. Reader spots are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Readers of all levels of experience are invited to participate! To sign up as a reader, complete the separate Reader Registration below.

READER SIGN UP

Schedule:
Monday, September 23:
6pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 1

Tuesday, September 24:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 2, co-hosted by Amherst College’s Frost Library

Wednesday, September 25:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 3

Thursday, September 26:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 4, co-hosted by the Jones Library

Friday, September 27:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 5, co-hosted by the Emily Dickinson International Society

Saturday, September 28:
9:30am [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 6

Gingerbread cookies will be served!

Sunday, September 29:
2pm [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Grand Finale

With coconut cake to celebrate!

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

graphic for delve into dickinson - Digital Dickinson The Museum’s Collection

Digital Dickinson
The Museum’s Collection
Wednesday, December 18, 6:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

graphic for delve into dickinson - Digital Dickinson The Museum’s Collection For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. View the full educator workshop lineup.
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.

REGISTER

Join Elias Bradley, Education Programs Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum, for an introduction to digital tools available for teaching and reading Dickinson. We’ll explore the materiality of Dickinson’s poetry and place through online resources that make her story more accessible than ever.

In this program, we’ll investigate pairings of poems with objects from the Museum’s digital collection and other repositories. What can personal domestic objects teach us about Dickinson’s life and her family’s pastimes, labors, and values? What can reading Dickinson’s poetry about the “lives” of man-made objects teach us about the force objects, themselves, exert on the world? Through discussion and prompts, we’ll consider strategies for reading objects as primary sources and how to use them to bring Dickinson’s material world to life.

Elias Bradley is the Education Programs Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum, where they work to create inclusive opportunities for learning, connection, and creative expression. In addition to managing programs for K-12 and College students, they curate the Museum’s poetry discussion group and serve on the steering committee of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival. Elias holds an MA with focuses in Nineteenth Century American Cultural History and Public History. Outside of work, they enjoy many hobbies, but the most Dickinsonian is exploring the flora and fauna of Western Massachusetts.

Dickinson's daguerrotype tripled and colored in yellow blue and red

Virtual Educator Workshops

Join us for our virtual professional development series for educators exploring Dickinson’s life and poetry. Led by Museum staff and special guests, each live, participatory workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Space is limited; sign up today for one session or all four! Attendees will leave each 90-minute session with new teaching strategies and context to connect to her poems and letters. While other educators are welcome, this series is especially designed for middle and high school humanities teachers.

Workshops are available via sliding scale. Your ticket helps provide low-cost programs and supports the attendance of other educators. If the cost is prohibitive, but you would like to attend, please write us at edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.

Professional Development certificates are available upon request.

Past Programs

Wednesday, December 3, 6:30pm ET

“My letter as a bee, goes laden”: Learning from Dickinson’s Letters
Featuring Cristanne Miller

Tuesday, November 11, 6:30pm ET

Pre-reading with Primary Sources: Dickinson’s Gardens and Volcanoes
Featuring Wendy Tronrud and Cheryl Weaver

Wednesday, November 5, 6:30pm ET

“Many a phrase has the English language -“: Teaching with Dickinson’s Manuscripts

Featuring Karen Sánchez-Eppler

Wednesday, October 22, 6:30pm ET

“The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –”: Dickinson’s Planetary Poems

Featuring Renée Bergland

Thursday, August 22, 2024

“Through the Dark Sod – as Education –”: Reading & Teaching Emily Dickinson’s Poems

Featuring Bruce Penniman

Thursday, September 12, 2024

“Nature and God – I neither knew” Emily Dickinson, “The Scientist of Faith”
Featuring Bruce Penniman

Thursday, October 16, 2024

“It feels a shame to be Alive -”: Emily Dickinson and the Civil War
Featuring Ivy Schweitzer and Al Salehi

Thursday, November 21, 2024

Dwelling in Possibility: The Pleasurable Path of What if Poems
Featuring Tess Taylor

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Digital Dickinson: The Museum’s Collection
Featuring Elias Bradley

graphic delve into dickinson - Dwelling in Possibility

Dwelling in Possibility
The Pleasurable Path of What if Poems
Thurs., November 21, 6:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

graphic delve into dickinson - Dwelling in Possibility For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

Amid her many unforgettable poems, a surprising number of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with an “IF”.

If she had been the Mistletoe/ And I had been the Rose/ How gay upon your table/ My velvet life to close

If pain for peace prepares/ Lo what “Augustan” years—

If I should die/ And you should live/ And time should gurgle on—

These iffy openings not only destabilizes the present, it opens the poem to the richness and pleasure of multiple imaginative realms. Yet how does the “if” help us read Dickinson, and poetry more broadly? If we began our own writing with an if, what words or worlds might we discover? In this workshop, we’ll examine Dickinson, as well as other poets across time, looking at poems that begin in speculative space, exploring how we too might write poems that begin in surprise and motor towards wisdom, or delight. Our time will include close reading, discussion, and prompts.

Headshot of Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. Taylor has been Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Northern Ireland, and the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.

Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org