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.
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 – Behind the Scenes with Emily Dickinson at the Jones Library
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!
Ada Limón 
Jericho Brown 
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 
Join us for part 6 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 
hours have perished here;
Join us for part 5 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
New to the writing world? Join Editorial Assistants from The Common to learn how literary magazines offer formative spaces for up-and-coming writers, and discover what you can do to get involved and even publish your own work. With our curated writing exercises inspired by poems from the pages of our magazine, we’ll take you through the process of writing pieces with creative poetic structure, content, and themes so that you, too, can create poems with a unique sense of place.
About Franny Choi: