“My letter as a bee, goes laden“:
VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.

Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.

View the full educator workshop lineup.

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

Join Cristanne Miller, co-editor of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (2022), for a presentation and workshop on teaching with the poet’s letters. Over 1,000 of Dickinson’s letters have been collected–the earliest sent to her brother Austin at the age of 11 and the last written shortly before her death. This new definitive edition–the first in over 60 years–includes almost 300 previously uncollected letters and more than 200 “letter poems.” Each is newly transcribed, revealing some previous transcription errors and uncovering deliberately omitted material.

The resulting collection paints a portrait of Dickinson as witty, engaging, and deeply connected with her community as well as the literature and events of her day. The letters provide meaningful context to her poems and can also stand alone as rich primary sources. This workshop will begin with an overview of the letters and Q&A with Miller, followed by interactive activities and discussion of select letters with Museum staff.

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Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature at University of Buffalo, emerita, where she publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and culture, including Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Harvard University Press, 1987), Reading in Time: Emily DIckinson in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2012), an edition of Dickinson’s complete poems: Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (Harvard University Press, 2016), winner of the MLA Scholarly Edition Prize and translated into Portuguese; and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell (Harvard University Press, 2024), named as a best 10 Books of the year by PBS News Hour, NPR, and the London Review of Books. Miller co-edited the 2022 Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson with Karen Sánchez-Eppler. She serves on the advisory board of the Emily Dickinson Archive, and formerly on the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.

Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.

View the full educator workshop lineup.

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

Join Drs. Cheryl Weaver and Wendy Tronrud, Dickinson scholars who have taught at both the secondary and post-secondary levels, for an interactive professional development workshop on two of Dickinson’s most evocative poetic landscapes–gardens and volcanoes. 

This workshop focuses on how teachers can use pre-reading strategies related to Dickinson’s historical and cultural contexts to support student readers of her poems. Beginning with an overview of how volcanoes and gardens are relevant to aspects of Dickinson’s poetry, Dr. Cheryl Weaver and Dr. Wendy Tronrud will engage participants in particular Dickinson poems, using related pre-reading strategies and introducing writing-to-learn strategies. Workshop participants will leave the session with strategies for use in or adaptable to any literature-related or humanities classrooms.

REGISTER

Wendy Tronrud is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Queens College, CUNY. She works on the intersection between education, poetry and visual arts across the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. She has published essays in Women’s Studies and ESQ in addition to art writing in The Brooklyn Rail and Camera Austria. She has recently co-edited an ESQ triple issue on Thomas Wentworth Higginson with Gerard Holmes. Currently, she is developing a book proposal on volcanoes in the nineteenth century. She is a co-chair of the Emily Dickinson International Society’s pedagogy community. 

Cheryl Weaver teaches IB Language and Literature at City Honors School in Buffalo, NY, United States. Her scholarly interests include nineteenth-century American literature, epistolary practice, and the pragmatics of postal delivery and postal history. She received the 2022 Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Fellowship in support of research related to her dissertation, “‘You know it is customary’: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Practice.” In 2023, she was awarded the  Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller Summer Research Fellowship at Historic Hudson Valley. She is a co-chair of the Emily Dickinson International Society’s pedagogy community. 

“The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –-“:
VIRTUAL PROGRAM

Join us for a virtual professional development program for educators exploring Dickinson’s manuscripts. This participatory zoom workshop will provide context and exercises that illuminate Dickinson’s frequently cryptic poetry. Attendees will leave this 90-minute session with new teaching strategies.

Registration is required and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Please select the ticket price that is right for you and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

You may request a Professional Development certificate upon registration.

View the full educator workshop lineup.

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

REGISTER

I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –

And back it slid – and I alone –
A speck upon a Ball –
Went out upon Circumference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell –

(Fr 633)

Join Renée Bergland, historian of science and author of Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles, Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science for an interactive educator’s workshop.

During Emily Dickinson’s lifetime, the universe expanded in every direction. Developments in astronomy, geology, and biology enlarged the scales of space and time. To many, the realization that humans were a tiny part of Earth’s geological past was profoundly disturbing. Byron concluded that the planet Earth was doomed, and that the universe would end in “Darkness.” Others, including Dickinson, were more ambivalent. “I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched – ” expresses a mix of despair at the loss of the old model of the universe and excitement about the possibilities of the new sciences. Dickinson’s poems insistently pressed different frames of reference together, inviting readers to find the relationship between different ways of thinking about the universe.

In this moment of planetary environmental emergency, Dickinson’s poetry gives us a way to talk about planetary grief and ecological anxiety, while also allowing us to imagine more hopeful frames of reference. This workshop will begin with a presentation of Dickinson’s planetary poems in the context of 19th-century science, followed by a discussion of how they invite us to expand our “Circumference” today. The workshop will conclude with a discussion of classroom activities and resources.

REGISTER

Renée Bergland is a literary critic and a historian of science who teaches in the Department of Humanities at Simmons University where she is Program Director of Literature and Writing. Her most recent publication is Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton University Press, 2024). She contributed an essay, “Dickinson Emergent: Natural Philosophy and the Postdisciplinary Manifold”, to the Oxford Handbook to Emily Dickinson (2022). Bergland is writing a forthcoming general audience book examining Dickinson’s poetry as interpreted through the lens of difference sciences, including astronomy, geology, and ecology. She is a member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society. 

HYBRID PROGRAM — in-person at the Emily Dickinson Museum AND streaming live for online registrants. Live cap

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, National Book Award and MacArthur Genius grantee Terrance Hayes and award-winning poet Krysten Hill, read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with moderator Nicole Callihan.

About the Poets
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, are forthcoming on Penguin in 2023. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University.

Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. She has featured poetry at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Boston Book Festival, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Blacksmith House, and other places. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series. Poetry Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency, 2024 SWWIM Residency, and Kenyon Review’s 2024 Peter Taylor Fellowship. She is currently the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

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 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 13th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! Register here to access the Festival schedule:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 5 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). Open mic sign-ups are handled in advance via a Google Form, and selected readers will be notified. All readers must be available to read in-person and must register for the Festival to be considered. 

Sign up for the open mic here by September 3!

About Los Lorcas
One of the most versatile and adventurous bard bands touring today, Los Lorcas are making ground-breaking inroads where most poets and musicians fear to tread, conjuring rich lyrical and sonic tapestries that defy predictable niches while celebrating “the music of what happens.” In the spirit of Federico Garcia Lorca—gifted musician, legendary poet/playwright and ebullient performer—poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, fuse poetry and music in a passionate and surprising mash-up. Los Lorcas blur boundaries between spoken word and song, weaving poetry with Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana and jazz in pursuit of the cante jondo (deep song) Lorca ardently championed.

VIRTUAL  and HYBRID Program (see date details below)

Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Come read with us and join in for the week-long Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon! An Emily Dickinson Museum tradition, the Marathon is a group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this year’s hybrid Festival, some sessions will take place in-person and others online. For the Marathon, we will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. 

Join us for the 13th annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! 

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

There are two ways to participate in each Marathon session: as a reader or as a listener.

• Listeners sit back and enjoy the group reading, which beautifully blends the voices of volunteer readers coming to Dickinson from different places, times in their lives, and levels of familiarity with the Poet. Listeners can watch the Marathon online via Zoom all week long. Listeners can watch the Marathon online OR in-person during the hybrid sessions on Saturday and Sunday. To sign up as a listener, register through the main Festival page.
• Readers volunteer to read 10-20 poems as part of the circle reading. Reader spots are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Readers of all levels of experience are invited to participate! To sign up as a reader, complete the separate Reader Registration below.

READER SIGN UP

Schedule:
Monday, September 15:
6pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 1 

Tuesday, September 16:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 2, co-hosted with Amherst College’s Frost Library

Thursday, September 18:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 4, co-hosted with the Jones Library

Friday, September 19:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 5, co-hosted with the Emily Dickinson International Society

Saturday, September 20:
9:30am [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 6

Treats will be served!

Sunday, September 21:
12:30pm [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Grand Finale

With coconut cake to celebrate!

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.

2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule