The words "The Emily Dickinson Marathon Folger Shakespeare Library 4" in white overlaying a green-tinted image of the library

Emily Dickinson Marathon
Part 4: Folger Shakespeare Library
September 17, 5-7pm

Virtual Program

Join us for part 4 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.

Part Four of the Dickinson Marathon is hosted by The Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection and major collections of other rare Renaissance books, manuscripts, and works of art. Located a block from the US Capitol in Washington D.C., the Folger opened in 1932, as a gift to the American people from founders Henry and Emily Folger and today serves a wide audience of scholars, visitors, teachers, students, families, and theater- and concert-goers. To learn more about the Folger visit https://www.folger.edu/

In this session we will read poems numbered 661-918 in the Franklin.

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

Approaching Emily in Turbulent Times: A Dickinson Poetry Discussion with Bruce Penniman
September 17, 12-1:30pm

Virtual Program

Emily Dickinson's handwriting on a letter and envelope

1864 was a turbulent year for Emily Dickinson. With the Civil War still raging and a consequential presidential election looming, Dickinson faced a medical crisis that kept her confined for months. Nonetheless, she wrote nearly one hundred poems that year, and many of them speak directly to the times that we are in now. Although Dickinson’s poetry can be challenging or even intimidating to readers new and well-versed alike, readers find that her incisive expression of the human experience is well worth the effort. Join us for a program of discussion and exploration as we tackle some beloved favorites and some lesser-known Dickinson poems from 1864. Participants of all levels of comfort with Dickinson are welcome and should be prepared to engage in group conversations facilitated by Bruce Penniman.

About the facilitator: Bruce M. Penniman taught writing, speech, and literature at Amherst Regional High School from 1971 until 2007 and recently retired (again) as the site director of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1999 he was Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and a finalist for National Teacher of the Year, and he is the author of Building the English Classroom: Foundations, Support, Success (NCTE, 2009). He has served as a teacher curriculum mentor in all four NEH Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place workshops and has facilitated discussions in the Poetry Discussion Group on topics ranging from “Emily Dickinson and the Bible” to “Emily Dickinson and Science.”

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

close up on Dickinson's face from the black and white dagguereotype

Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting, July 31-August 1, 2020

In collaboration with the Emily Dickinson Museum, the 2020 EDIS Annual Meeting will be held virtually from July 31 to August 1. This remote event requires advance sign up; to register, click this link: https://edis.press.jhu.edu/membership/conference

This year’s focus is “Dickinson at a Distance” – How does Dickinson respond generatively and creatively to friends, relatives, and other writers even over distances of time and space? How does she engage with events that happen elsewhere or in other historical periods? What does she think about strangers, immigrants, people living in other places? In what ways did Dickinson and others in her era close geographic and emotional distance, and how might we learn to overcome or interrogate the same issues? This virtual, one-day Annual Meeting explores how figurations of isolation, distance, and remoteness in Dickinson’s work can teach us ways to connect more deeply with each other on personal, emotional, and intellectual levels.

A variety of synchronic and asynchronic scholarly panels, cultural events, and poetry sessions, using Zoom and YouTube as platforms, are planned for this event.

To find out more about the schedule for this event, click here: [Link]

a woman with short blonde hair, blue glasses, and blue necklace stands in front a fireplace

“Tell It Slant” Through Dickinson’s Art, Artifacts, & Home: A Writing Workshop with Jan Freeman
September 16, 7-9pm

Virtual Program

This workshop offers poems by Dickinson and other poets, which use art, music, and literature as springboards to express emotions, memories, observations. Participants will engage in exercises that heighten awareness of their associations with color, emotions, and place to strengthen their use of metaphor to “tell it slant.” Experienced and inexperienced poets will open their imaginations and express their truths sideways just as Dickinson did, responding to paintings, artifacts in the Emily Dickinson Museum’s collection (the poet’s desk, Gib’s jacket, the cradle, the clock, Dickinson’s white dress), and photos of architectural features in the Homestead and The Evergreens. Prompts will be provided and participants will share their drafts. Recommended for writers age 17+.

About the facilitator: Jan Freeman is author of three collections of poetry, most recently Blue Structure (Calypso Editions, 2016). Her poems are forthcoming or recently appeared in POETRY magazine, Plume, Salamander, and Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest. She was founding director of Paris Press, where she published Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Correspondence with Susan Huntington Dickinson. She teaches at the MASS MoCA Ekphrastic Poetry Retreats and is a Mass Poetry teacher in the schools. She was recently named a 2020-2021 Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. http://www.janfreeman.net/about

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

Emily Dickinson Marathon
Part 3: Houghton Library
September 16, 4-6pm

The Emily Dickinson Marathon Houghton Library 3 in white text overlaid on a tinted red image of the Emily Room at Houghton Join us for part 3 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.

Our part 3 partner is the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The Houghton Library is known for its holdings of papers of 19th-century American writers, and many would say that the jewel in that crown is the Emily Dickinson Collection, which preserves more than 1,000 autograph poems and some 300 letters. Learn more about the Houghton here: https://library.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton

In this session we will read poems numbered 408-660 in the Franklin.

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

words "THe Emily Dickinson Marathon Jones Library 2 in white overlayed on blue tinted image of the library

Emily Dickinson Marathon
Part 2: The Jones Library
September 15, 2-4pm

Join us for part 2 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.

Our part 2 partner is the Jones library. This public library is a community hub to a diverse population of Amherst, Massachusetts residents, where books are celebrated and all members of the community can enhance their educational, cultural, and lifelong learning pursuits. To learn more about the Jones Library visit www.joneslibrary.org.

In this session we will read poems numbered 149-407 in the Franklin.

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

Amherst Arts Night Poetry Reading, August 6, 2020 – REMOTE PROGRAM

During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus with remote poetry readings every first Thursday at 6:30PM (EST).

This program is free to attend. Registration is required. To sign-up and receive the link, click here.

In August, our feature poets are:

Rebecca Hart Olander: Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry has appeared recently in Crab Creek Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Collaborative work made with Elizabeth Paul has been published in multiple venues online and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press). Rebecca is a Women’s National Book Association poetry contest winner and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook, Dressing the Wounds, was published by dancing girl press in 2019, and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2021. Rebecca teaches writing at Westfield State University and is editor/director of Perugia Press. Find her at rebeccahartolander.com and @rholanderpoet.

Photo credit Jen Fitzgerald

Leah Umansky: Leah Umansky is the author of two full length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), and Domestic Uncertainties (2013), among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, Guernica, Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Poetry International, Thrush Poetry Journal, Rhino, and Pleiades. She is resisting the tyrant with her every move. She is #teamstark #teamelliot & #teambernard and can be found at www.leahumansky.com. Twitter: @lady_Bronte. Instagram: @leah.umansky

(photo credit Jen Fitzgerald)

Omotara James:Omotara James is the author of the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. A former social worker in the field of Harm Reduction. She has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. She is a recipient of the 2019 92Y / Discovery Poetry Prize and the winner of the 2019 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Poetry. In addition, her work has been recognized with the Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Prize, two Pushcart Prize nominations and one Best of the Net nomination. Her work was selected for the 2020 Best Small Fictions Anthology and she was a 2019 finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY magazine, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets, Platypus Press,The Believer, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America, Nat.Brut, No Tokens and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and lives in NYC. Her debut collection of poems, “Song of my Softening” is forthcoming from Alice James Books and available for pre-order here:https://www.alicejamesbooks.org/news/omotarajames

a framed silhouette of emily dickinson as a child and a lock of her bright red hair

Behind the Scenes with Emily Dickinson at the Frost Library’s Special Collections
September 14, 12-1:15pm

Virtual Program.

Join us for a very special behind the scenes look at the holdings of Amherst College Frost Library’s Special Collections. Head of Archives and Special Collections, Mike Kelly, gives you an up close and personal look at this treasure trove of Dickinsonia, including original poetry manuscripts and letters, the famous daguerreotype of the poet as a teenager, and an original lock of the poet’s hair. Hear the stories these objects can tell and learn about recent work and acquisitions to the collection. A Q&A follows the presentation.

About the facilitator: Mike Kelly is the Head of the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, where he oversees the school’s collection of more than 80,000 rare books along with a host of archival and manuscript collections. He has worked in special collections for over twenty years; he spent eleven years as the Curator of Books at the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University before coming to Amherst in 2009. He has held many positions within the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association, including a term as RBMS Chair in 2011-12, and he is an active member of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM). He received his Master’s in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin where he spent two years as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center; he also holds an MA in English from the University of Virginia. In 2016, he was awarded the Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas by the Bibliographical Society of America for his work on the bibliography of Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut. He co-curated (with Carolyn Vega) the exhibition “I’m Nobody! Who Are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York which ran from January through May 2017. In the summer of 2018, Mike co-taught the course “A History of Native American Books & Indigenous Sovereignty” in Amherst for Rare Book School. He was elected to membership in the Grolier Club in 2005 and the American Antiquarian Society in 2016.

2020 Tell It Slant Facebook Video – Behind the Scenes with Emily Dickinson at the Frost Library’s Special Collections

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

The Emily Dickinson Marathon Emily Dickinson Museum 1 written in black text overlaid on a tinted yellow image of the Homestead

Emily Dickinson Marathon
Part 1
September 14, 9:30-11:30am

Join us for part 1 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 first session of the Marathon will be hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum, organizers and producers of the the Tell it Slant Poetry Festival.

In this session we will begin with Franklin’s undated poems, numbered 1686-1789, and then circle back to poems numbered 1-148.

2020 Tell It Slant Schedule

Martha Ackmann Virtual Book Talk and Q&A, August 16, 2020, 5-6 p.m. (EST)

“Radiant prose, palpable descriptions, and deep empathy for the poet’s sensibility make this biography extraordinary.”

– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Join us for a virtual reading and Q&A with Martha Ackmann, author of the recently released These Fevered Days (W.W. Norton, 2020)! On this auspicious day, exactly 150 years since the meeting of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the Homestead parlor, Ackmann will read the chapter detailing this particular pivotal moment. During the robust Q&A to follow, pose your question to the poet’s most recent biographer.

This program is free to attend and registration is required. Click here to register.

About the book:

In These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson, Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten days that distill her evolution as a poet. Following Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, her exhilarating frenzy of composition, her startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, her anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” her lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson, and her despair in confronting possible blindness, These Fevered Days utilizes thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos to construct a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. The book provides new insights into Dickinson’s wildly original poetry and draws a vivid portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.

To purchase your copy from your local, independent book seller, visit www.indiebound.org/indie-bookstore-finder

About the author:

Dr. Martha Ackmann is a journalist and author who writes about women who have changed America. Her essays and columns have appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, and The Atlantic. She also is a frequent commentator for New England Public Radio, and has been featured on CNN, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Martha’s award-winning books include The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League, and These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson. A long-time member of the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College, Martha taught a popular seminar on Emily Dickinson in the poet’s house, now the Emily Dickinson Museum, in Amherst, Massachusetts. For more information visit https://marthaackmann.com/