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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Join us for a generative workshop that pairs the visual art form of collage with poetry! Participants will be guided through a process of discovery with different collaging materials and text to create their own hand-crafted collage. You will walk away with seeds of poems, deeper knowledge and experience with a visual art form, and a found poetry technique to help you — in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson — “tell all the truth but tell it slant “! All levels of experience with poetry and visual art are welcome.
Where do we find home, belonging and comfort in a time of crisis? What might Emily Dickinson tell us about how to find comfort and strength when it sometimes feels like nothing we do can change things for the better? Head editor and chair Zoë Brigley presents three brilliant new editors from the magazine Poetry Wales: Kandace Siobhan Walker, Tangie Mitchell and Zakia Carpenter-Hall. These rising poetry stars will talk about where they find comfort, reading classic poems such as “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ alongside less well known Dickinson poems and their own work.
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, National Book Award and MacArthur Genius grantee Terrance Hayes and award-winning poet Krysten Hill, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with moderator Nicole Callihan.
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?