IN-PERSON PANEL — 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 panel of award-winning poets of color, queer poets, and disabled poets will explore the evolving intersections of ekphrastic and documentary poetics, challenging traditional boundaries between image, language, and evidence. In a time when truth is suppressed, redacted, and revised in real time, while art, research, and scholarship is defunded, this panel of poet-educators explores ekphrastic dialogue as community practice, a multi-voiced collaboration that resists erasure. Audiences will leave with generative strategies for their creative practice, classrooms and other community spaces, inspired by expanding possibilities for this collaborative practice and the ways it can be leveraged to nourish healthy communities.About the presenters
Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poetry is With My Back to the World, which received the Forward Prize in Poetry. Tree of Knowledge is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Other books are OBIT, The Trees Witness Everything, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Her latest children’s book is Eureka. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fourth book, The Medium, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2027. She is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the 2024–2026 Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County and a recipient of the 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. She served as a poetry judge for the National Book Awards and is the author of four poetry collections, including Tortillera, winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize. A community-engaged poet, she collaborates widely across South Florida and serves as Senior Editor of SWWIM Every Day.
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.
Join us on Emily Dickinson’s lawn or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, Victoria Chang and Samyak Shertok will read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration. Q&A to follow.
Tell it and DRAW it in slant with this poetry comics workshop. Suitable for all ages and creative inclinations, come explore poetry through short comics. Comics combine words and images, and like slant poetry, gives us new and complex ways to narrate with the world around us. Participants will learn how to develop visual images to accompany short poems and arrange them in 4 or 6 panel comics.
Dickinson examined, studied, and utilized tiny items and tight envelope contours in the service of poem-making. This two-part workshop will discuss how the constraint of shape and size forces creativity: We will first meditate on a small, everyday object and honor it in the creation of a poem; we will then consider how restricted page space makes a poem even more expansive. Led by four apartment-dwelling Brooklynite poet-educators (including one urban planner and one visual designer), participants will make and share poems that reveal the “passing Universe” in minute ephemera and confines.
January, Enzo and Amy are award-winning poets and Massachusetts Book Award honorees, but their paths to success weren’t easy. All three writers are parents, wage earners, and in some cases, caregivers, with multiple community and professional connections and responsibilities. Like Dickinson, each of these poets has at times wished they could bolt the door to their room and simply be left alone with their words. This interactive panel, reading, and discussion will open the door to those conflicting demands and provide strategies — and, hopefully, inspiration—for those in a similar predicament, those who “could not stop.”
In this interactive, generative workshop, poets will explore the language and themes of Emily Dickinson – at a slant. To honor Dickinson’s breathtakingly odd and brilliant work, poets will create group poems in the voice of a collective ‘we’. Poets will create found poems by combining their own words with words found in poems by Emily Dickinson. Sound intimidating? It will not be, as two-time World Poetry Slam champion, Joaquín Zihuatanejo, will be there to guide us along the way.
In this poetry workshop, we shall visit a colorful mystery: a ten-foot shawl which belonged to a wren-size poet. Did Emily Dickinson wear this? Sitting at her window desk, looking out toward The Evergreens? Suddenly thrown about her as she wandered into the garden, visiting a robin? In bed, contemplating a wild night? After exploring some Dickinson poems which use patterns analogous to the shawl’s, participants will be invited to write lines which are inspired by the shawl’s patterns, inspired by imaginings of Dickinson wearing the shawl, or by both aspects. “Artists wrestled here!/Lo, a tint Cashmere!/Lo, a Rose!”—F11A
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.
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?