VIRTUAL WORKSHOP — streaming live for online registrants
Registration is required.
Part of the 2026 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!
Join us for the 14th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum!
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?About the presenters
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has published two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review, TLS, and Poetry. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches poetry at 92NY and Columbia University.
elizabethmetzger.com
Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, and Arctic Revival, selected by Elizabeth Alexander for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry appears in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and a PhD in Creative and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review Books.
calliesiskel.com
Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e))
dorothealasky.com
Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival
The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is sustained by the Emily Dickinson Fund, which provides critical, unrestricted support for the Museum’s day-to-day operations. Your generous donation helps us offer immersive poetry programs to a global audience and preserve the historic Dickinson legacy in Amherst. As the Fund supplies 36% of our annual budget, your tax-deductible contribution is essential to our mission. Join us in inspiring learners of all ages by making an immediate impact today.
Time travel with Emily Dickinson from her clockless childhood to eternity’s carriage ride. During this generative workshop, we’ll explore time’s slant in Dickinson’s poetics, then leap into the present to write our own time travel poems in the contemporary ‘century’ form — a 100-word prose poem. Using Dickinson’s lines as launchpads, craft yours decade-by-decade through short timed prompts. We’ll cap this with ‘bursts of now’: 100-second single-image sprints! Add numerical and temporal play to your poetic toolbox and leave with fresh work.
Enjoy short readings and discussion in response to the idea that poetry acts as filter and sponge for the world to enter, reveal, and inspire. What meanings are our words saturated with, and where does that discovery lead? When do environmental, historical, and sociopolitical realities flood the page? How does the body’s experience of writing impact the poetry itself? At this panel, poets Oliver Baez Bendorf, Patrycja Humienik, and Livia Meneghin will share poetry in response to these understandings of porosity and discuss living within and between language, when and how poetry can surprise us, and where Emily Dickinson’s poetry serves as example.
This workshop will offer three perspectives from Japanese literature—haiku, tanka and haibun—in connection to Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Acclaimed craftswomen of these forms will share a wide range of example works including 10th-century zuihitsu, poems by a 19th-century Japanese female poet (a contemporary of Emily Dickinson), haiku based on the African American experience, as well as their own work inspired by respective examples. The audience will be given writing prompts and invited to share their works and discuss.
Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023) and two poetry collections, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Washington and is an associate professor at Western Washington University. Her work appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, POETRY, and McSweeney’s. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has received numerous fellowships and exhibits interdisciplinary art nationally.
Anastacia-Reneé (she/they) is a queer writer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad), named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023 and an American Library Association Notable Book of 2024, along with (v.), Forget It, and Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere. A former Seattle Civic Poet, TEDx speaker, and radio host, she has received the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award and fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, and Ragdale.