“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

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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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. 

“Many a phrase has the English language -“:
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

This program is being rescheduled. A new date and registration link will be provided soon.

Many a phrase has the English language –
I have heard but one –
Low as the laughter of the Cricket,
Loud, as the Thunder’s Tongue

Murmuring, like old Caspian Choirs,
When the Tide’s a’lull –
Saying itself in new inflection –
Like a Whippowil –

Breaking in bright Orthography
On my simple sleep –
Thundering it’s Prospective –
Till I stir, and weep –

Not for the Sorrow, done me –
But the push of Joy –
Say it again, Saxon!
Hush — Only to me!

(Fr 333)

Because fewer than a dozen of Dickinson’s nearly 1800 poems were published during her lifetime, the poems we read and teach are rarely authorized or final texts. Dickinson’s original manuscripts sometimes exist in multiple versions; contain alternate words or phrases; are drafted on odd scraps of paper with striking shapes; and have line breaks different from the tidy quatrains with which they are usually printed. For example, in this poem that plays with the relation between the English language and the language of the natural world, Dickinson writes:

Breaking in bright Orthogra-
phy

creating an unconventional break in a line about breaking. This manuscript also includes alternate phrasings; she wonders whether the “push of Joy” in line 14 might instead be the “Pain of joy.” But Dickinson did not choose. There is no right answer to these manuscript questions. And that makes them a wonderful resource for teaching, for helping students get inside of Dickinson’s creative process, and for encouraging them to ask questions without fear of “getting it wrong.”

Join Karen Sánchez-Eppler for an interactive Zoom workshop discussing how to use Dickinson manuscripts in the classroom through the free Emily Dickinson Archive. The workshop will consider different approaches to the manuscripts, including poems that exist in variant versions, manuscript poems with alternate words, and those surprising, often visually stunning scraps an editor has dubbed her “radical scatters” and “gorgeous nothings.”

Karen Sánchez-Eppler has been a professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College since 1988, specializing in 19th century literature and history, and so has long ties both to Dickinson and to Amherst. Her first book Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993) concludes with a chapter on Dickinson. She recently served as co-editor with Cristanne Miller of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (2022) and is currently writing a brief critical biography, Emily Dickinson / Critical Lives, for Reaktion Books. Another of her book projects in process The Unpublished Republic: Manuscript Cultures of the Mid-Nineteenth Century US considers 19th century manuscript projects more broadly. Her book Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005) considers writing by children, most of which also only exists in manuscript form. That project helped spur the creation of the Historic Children’s Voices database at the American Antiquarian Society facilitating a teacher’s institute on its use in 2024 that will run again in August 2026. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the NEH, ACLS, the Newberry Library, the Winterthur Library, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Fulbright Foundation. She spent the 2019-20 academic year as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society, is one of the founding co-editors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, President of the Porter- Phelps-Huntington Foundation Board of Directors, and a longtime member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society and of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Board of Governors.

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

Introduced 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.

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

Beginner 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.

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

In 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.