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.
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 
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 
During the pandemic, the Emily Dickinson Museum is celebrating monthly 
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 
Omotara James:
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 
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. 
