Join poet Shayla Lawson as she reads from her new essay collection This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope, which has been called “a hilarious, heartbreaking, and endlessly entertaining homage to black women’s resilience and excellence” (Kirkus Reviews). A Q&A with Lawson follows the reading. This event kicks off the Amherst College Creative Writing Fall Reading Series. 

Please click here to register for this free program.

About the poet: Shayla Lawson is the author of three books of poetry—A Speed Education in Human Being, the chapbook Pantone, and I Think I’m Ready to see Frank Ocean—and the essay collection This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope, which Kirkus called “A hilarious, heartbreaking, and endlessly entertaining homage to black women’s resilience and excellence.” She was born in Rochester, Minnesota, grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, studied architecture in Italy, and spent a few years as a Dutch housewife—milkmaid braids and all. She teaches at Amherst College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

Virtual Program

Join us for the final segment of the week-long Emily Dickinson Marathon! An Emily Dickinson Museum tradition, the Marathon is a group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of about 14 hours. For this year’s remote Festival, we are partnering with six other organizations to host the Marathon in two-hour sessions each day of this week. For the marathon, we will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition.

The culminating session of the Marathon will be hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum, organizers and producers of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival. 

In this session we will read poems numbered 1414-1685 in the Franklin. Text of the poems will be screen-shared for those who do not have their own poetry editions.

This program will be livestreamed to the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Facebook page and available to viewers there during and after the program.

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.

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

Virtual Program

photo by Jeff Morgan

Sweet hours have perished here;

This is a mighty room;

Within its precincts hopes have played, —

Now shadows in the tomb.  

-J1767 

Spend a “sweet hour” in Emily Dickinson’s creative space where she penned her startling poetry. Whether you are a writer, an artist, a composer, or a poet, you’ll find solace and inspiration for your artistic output in Emily Dickinson’s library. Let this quiet virtual experience jumpstart your next creative journey. 

What to expect: As one of a limited number of participants, you will need to find a quiet spot with a good internet connection from which to be immersed in a live feed from the library of Emily Dickinson’s Homestead. In this room were gathered Dickinson’s favorite books, her “Kinsmen of the Shelves” that “carried her to lands away.” A facilitator in the room gently welcomes you and guides you through three inspirational prompts to help you explore this unique physical and psychic space and unleash your own creativity over the course of the hour. No share-outs will occur in this session, but participants may choose to share materials with the group after the program if desired.

Space is limited for this program. This program is full. 

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.

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

Join us for a very special behind the scenes look at the holdings of the Jones Library’s Special Collections in Amherst, Massachusetts. Head of Special Collections, Cyndi Harbeson, gives you an up close and personal look at a unique Dickinson collection that places the poet within her nineteenth-century Amherst context. The holdings include approximately 7,000 items, including original manuscript poems and letters, Dickinson editions and translations, and family correspondence. Hear the stories these objects can tell and learn about recent work and acquisitions to the collection. A Q&A follows the presentation. To learn more about the Jones Library and this collection visit: https://www.joneslibrary.org/316/Dickinson-Emily#background

About the facilitator: Cyndi Harbeson has wanted to be a librarian ever since she was a kid keeping her mother company in the Newington Public Library in Connecticut where her mother worked. But she also loved history – she has a master’s of arts in History and a master’s of science in library science with an archives concentration. When undergraduate at Simmons, she realized she could marry her two passions. Harbeson was a processing archivist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina before becoming Head of Special Collections at the Jones Library. She loves New England history, including Emily Dickinson, and visited the Homestead as a child.

Settle in for an evening of music and poetry celebrating Emily Dickinson’s ongoing creative legacy with the work of three contemporary artists. Singer-songwriter Kimaya Diggs, brings you new original settings of Dickinson poems live from the poet’s bedroom, and headliners Ada Limón and Jericho Brown read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration. The evening begins and ends with 20-minute musical sets by Diggs, bookending the headliner poetry reading and Q&A with Brown, Limón, and guest interviewer Nathan McClain.  Don’t miss out on this special evening of community through art!

Live captioning will be available at this event!

*A note about Rosh Hashanah: We apologize that this event falls on the occasion of the Jewish New Year. The Festival has historically been scheduled in the third week of September for consistency and to avoid overlap with other local events. This program will be recorded and made available to view for three months following the event itself. Please register to receive information on how to view the recording. Shanah Tovah! 

About the artists:

Kimaya Diggs has mastered a genre-defying style. Inspired by the acrobatic folk renderings of Joni Mitchell, Ella Fitzgerald’s jazz stylings, and Lianna LaHavas’ soulful charisma, she draws skillfully from her lineage of musical pioneers, creating a musical lane all her own. With a playful presence and frank, transporting storytelling, Diggs’ mastery of her voice is the focal point of each performance, and a transfixing experience. Information and music at kimayadiggs.com or on instagram at @kimayadiggs.

Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top 5 poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, TIME magazine, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

About the interviewer:

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers.  His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, and The Critical Flame.  He teaches at Hampshire College. For more information visit www.nathanmcclain.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. 

2020 Tell It Slant Facebook Video – Festival Headliners Ada Limón and Jericho Brown with Music by Kimaya Diggs

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule