The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival returns September 15-21!
Join us for a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum.
The Emily Dickinson Museum’s annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is an event with international reach that celebrates Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy and the contemporary creativity she and her work continues to inspire from the place she called home.
This year’s line-up features a talented group of poets from around the world including a reading by National Book Award and MacArthur Genius grantee Terrance Hayes with award-winning poet Krysten Hill, generative writing workshops, poetry panels, an open mic, live music, and more. The cornerstone of the Festival, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, is an epic reading of all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson’s poems across the Festival week. Learn more about the 2025 lineup below.
FESTIVAL TICKETS:
Free Festival access is available. However, registrants are encouraged to consider choosing the “Pay Your Way” ticket price of $20 per event. Revenue from Festival tickets supports honoraria for participating poets and the production costs of high-quality hybrid Festival events. Purchase 10 or more Pay Your Way tickets, and we will gift you an official Emily Dickinson Museum tote bag!
Small Group Workshops: This year, the Festival is offering three concurrent workshops for in-person participants on Sunday morning. Due to the limited event capacity, these workshops are available for a fee of $25. Tickets for small group workshops on Sunday must be purchased separately. See the Festival ticket menu.
A limited number of VIP Festival tickets are available at two levels: VIP, and VIP Dinner Guest. At both levels, these tickets offer a heightened Festival experience that includes access to all festival programs and the small group workshop of your choosing, reserved seating, a Festival swag bag, and a private reception and tour of the Homestead art installation, ‘A Something Overtakes the Mind’. At the VIP Dinner Guest level, ticket holders (only six total seats available!) are invited to an intimate dinner on Saturday, September 20, in the Dickinson dining room at the Homestead with Festival headliners Terrance Hayes and Krysten Hill, and Jane Wald, the Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum.
For all tickets, donations in support of the Museum’s programming are welcome in the final step of registration. Your support is deeply appreciated.
REGISTER
THE SCHEDULE:
REGISTER
Monday, September 15:
6-8:30pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 1
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
Tuesday, September 16:
12-2:15pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 2, co-hosted with Amherst College’s Frost Library
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
3:30-5pm [Virtual Workshop] — The Beauty of Objectivity
This workshop provides beginning poets with a framework for analyzing poetry with an objective approach centered on craft elements. Participants will analyze Dickinson’s poems and contemporary examples, and they will generate and analyze their own poetry in response to Dickinson-centered prompts.
Featuring Mary Robles and Lucas Clark.
6:30-8pm [Virtual Workshop] — Putting the Wit in Witness: Bringing Levity to Heavy Topics
In this generative workshop, we turn to Dickinson and other contemporary poets who use a light hand to address tough subjects. Through readings and interactive writing exercises, participants will explore the power of this approach to inspire their own writing.
Featuring Amie Whittemore and Jung Hae Chae.
Wednesday, September 17:
12-2:15pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 3, co-hosted with Harvard University’s Houghton Library
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
2:30-4pm [Virtual Workshop] — Letters to the World: Epistolary Creativity Workshop
In this gentle and good-humored generative writing program, participants will play with letter-writing as a form of poetic and personal expression while drawing inspiration from Dickinson’s own letters. Guided freewriting sessions will be followed by opportunities for sharing and reflection. No experience necessary.
Featuring Sylvie Cathrall.
4:30-6pm [Virtual Panel] — From Blank to Blank: How and Why to Use Blackout Poetry
What do acts of erasure afford a writer? In this interactive workshop, we’ll be looking closely at resonant models of erasure (including Nicole Sealey, Sarah Sloat, Tracy K. Smith, and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth), and exploring the effects of different blackout poetry strategies.
Featuring Matt Donovan and Jenny George, authors of We are Not Where We Are, an erasing of Thoreau’s Walden.
7:30-9pm [Virtual Workshop] — The Interior and the Other: on poetic and psychic transformation
What can poetry teach us about psychoanalysis, and the process of sharing one’s inner self with another? What can therapeutic or healing work teach us about writing poems? In this panel, two poets who have written about and undergone forms of therapy will explore the art and practice of writing about interiority and healing.
Featuring Ayelet Amittay and Dana Levin.
Thursday, September 18:
12-2:15pm [Virtual Program] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 4, co-hosted with the Jones Library
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
3-4:30pm [Virtual Workshop] — Food & Free Verse: A Celebration of Food Through Poetry
Meditate on different ways to perceive the way food nourishes the soul, just like a poem does: through memory and survival, through gratitude, through synaesthesia, through love languages and through socio-economic commentary. This is a unique poetry generative writing workshop for writers of all levels.
Featuring Vasvi Kejriwal and Saranya Subramanian.
6-7:15pm [Virtual Reading] — Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Reading
Festival edition of the Museum’s monthly poetry reading series. Hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.
Featuring Livia Meneghin, Meg Day, and Rajiv Mohabir.
Friday, September 19:
12-2:15pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 5, co-hosted with the Emily Dickinson International Society
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
7-8:30pm [Hybrid Performance] — Open Mic Night featuring the music of Los Lorcas
Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 4 minutes each to make us feel “physically as if the top of [our] head[s] were taken off!” (Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 16 August 1870). Los Lorcas will perform after the Open Mic. Open mic sign-ups are handled in advance via a Google Form, and selected readers will be notified. Sign up here by September 3!
Saturday, September 20:
9:30am-12pm[Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 6
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this session, readers must be present on-site, but listeners are welcome both in-person and online. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Treats inspired by Dickinson’s own love of baking will be served. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
1-2:30pm [Hybrid Workshop] — Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Legacy of Correspondence
Emily Dickinson is known to have written more than a thousand intimate and poetic letters in her lifetime. In this workshop, poets will discuss the necessity and ascendancy of correspondence in their own lives and work. Panelists will consider poetry’s deep intersection of private world and public sphere, and then ask participants to do the same as they pen their own letter-poems.
Featuring Caitlin McDonnell, Nicole Callihan, Tina Cane, and Zoë Ryder White.
3:30-5pm [Hybrid Panel] — Thank You For The Surgery: The Poet-Editor Relationship
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?
Featuring Elizabeth Metzger, Callie Siskel, and Dorothea Lasky.
7-9pm [Hybrid Reading] — Headliner Night with Terrance Hayes and Krysten Hill
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets will read from their work and discuss poetic practice and inspiration. A Q&A facilitated by Nicole Callihan and a book-signing with the poets to follow. Books will be available for sale on site.
Sunday, September 21:
10-11:30am [Virtual Panel] — Home in a Time of Crisis: New Poets from Poetry Wales
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?
Featuring Zoe Brigley, Tangie Mitchell, Zakia Carpenter-Hall, and Kandace Siobhan Walker.
10-11:30am [Paid In-Person Workshop] — Paste It Slant: A Collage Poetry Workshop
Join 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. All levels of experience with poetry and visual art are welcome.
Featuring Leticia Rocha.
10-11:30am [Paid In-Person Workshop] — Poems in the Garden: A Poetry Workshop with The WildStory Podcast
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.
Featuring Ann Wallace and Elizabeth Sylvia.
10-11:30am [Paid In-Person Workshop] — Children’s Book Covers: Diving Boards Into Our Imagination
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.
Featuring María Luisa Arroyo.
12:30-2:30pm [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Grand Finale
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this session, readers must be present on-site, but listeners are welcome both in-person and online. We will read from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Stay to the end to enjoy a celebratory slice of coconut cake inspired by Dickinson’s own recipe. Sign up as a listener by registering for the Festival, or learn more about signing up as a reader!
REGISTER
About the Festival:
The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is an event with international reach that celebrates Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy and the contemporary creativity she and her work continues to inspire from the place she called home.
The Festival is named for Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” underscoring the revolutionary power of poetry to shift our perspective and reveal new truths. Festival organizers are committed to featuring established and emerging poets who represent the diversity of the contemporary poetry landscape and to fostering community by placing poetry in the public sphere.
This year’s line-up features workshops, panels, and readings, by a diverse and talented group of poets from around the world. The cornerstone of the Festival, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, is an epic reading of all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
To follow along with the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, get your copy of the Franklin edition from the Emily Dickinson Museum Shop.
The annual event attracts a diverse audience of Dickinson fans and poetry lovers, including students, educators, aspiring writers, and those who are new to poetry and literary events. Past Festival headliners have included Carl Phillips, Marilyn Nelson, Abigail Chabitnoy, Tracy K. Smith, Tiana Clark, Tess Taylor, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paisley Rekdal, Adrian Matejka, Kaveh Akbar, and Ocean Vuong.
Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:
Admission to all Poetry Festival events is free–made possible by contributions from Museum supporters.
Please consider making a donation of any size during the registration process or anytime on the Museum’s website.
