HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum AND streaming live for online registrants.
This program is FREE to attend. 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!
Join us on Emily Dickinson’s lawn or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, Victoria Chang and Samyak Shertok will read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration. Q&A to follow.
About the Poets
Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poetry is With My Back to the World, which received the Forward Prize in Poetry. Tree of Knowledge is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Other books are OBIT, The Trees Witness Everything, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Her latest children’s book is Eureka. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award and the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Waxwing, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf CoastPrize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University.
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.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn is the author of the full-length collection Girl in a Bear Suit (Elixir Press, 2024) and the e-chapbook Disambiguation (Salamander/Suffolk University, 2024). She’s the winner of the Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Recent work has appeared in or is coming soon from swamp pink, Villain Era, The Common, & On the Seawall. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family and serves as the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She is assistant director of the Jacobson Center for Writing at Smith College, and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
Okwudili Nebeolisa is the author of Terminal Maladies (Autumn House Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently studying fiction at the University of Minnesota. His work appears in POETRY, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review, among others. He has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Granum Foundation.
Annie Wenstrup is Dena’ina poet and the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). Awarded the 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, the tenth annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers, and the Alaska Literary Award in 2023, Wenstrup is an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow. She lives on the traditional territories of the lower Tanana Dene Peoples in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Esther Lin is an undocumented poet and the author of “Cold Thief Place” (Alice James Books, 2025), long-listed for the National Book Award, and “The Ghost Wife” (Poetry Society of America, 2018). A co-organizer of Undocupoets, Lin’s work has been supported by Cité Internationale, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Stanford University, the Poetry Society of America, among others. She lives in Seattle.
Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He is the author of OSSIA, a winner of The Changes Book Prize judged by Louise Glück. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, LitHub, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina’s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
Oak Morse lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MLIS from the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the recipient of the 2025 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Award and the 2024 A Public Space Writing Fellowship. Oak has received support from PEN America and fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Twelve Literary Arts, Cave Canem’s Starshine, and Clay, as well as a Stars in the Classroom honor from the Houston Texans. His work appears in POETRY, Callaloo, Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Obsidian, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Hobart, with work forthcoming in Rattle, among others. 
A Daisy for Dickinson