graphic Headliner Night and Garden Party - Tell It Slant 2025

Headliner Night
with Terrance Hayes and Krysten Hill
Saturday, Sept. 20, 7pm ET

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

Headliner Night - Tell It Slant 2025 graphicJoin 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.

Nicole Callihan has two recent poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), as well as the chapbooks Downtown, A Study in Spring, and ELSEWHERE (the latter two in collaboration with Zoë Ryder White). Nicole also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024.
 
 

 

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

 

 
Open Mic - Tell It Slant 2025

Open Mic Night
With Music from Los Lorcas
Friday, Sept. 19, 7pm ET

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

Open Mic - Tell It Slant 2025

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.


 

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

 

 

 

Press Release:
A Something Overtakes the Mind

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Patrick Fecher
publicrelations@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

A Something Overtakes the Mind — a multimedia visual art and poetry installation created by artists Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan for the Emily Dickinson Museum — takes a cue from the words of Emily Dickinson and, through explorations of domestic objects, biographical details, found poetry, and community testimonials, seeks to find new ways of engaging with the poet’s life and legacy. 

The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025 through December 21, 2025.

Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of wrapping paper, “Did you ever read one of her Poems backward because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—A something overtakes the Mind.”

On August 1st, the Emily Dickinson Museum will open an art installation featuring the work of visual artist Ligia Bouton and poet Matt Donovan. The installation will be on view on the ground floor of the Homestead in spaces that historically served the Dickinson family as their laundry room, kitchen, and dining room. Following the exhibition the Museum will prepare this part of the historic house for the third and final phase of Homestead restoration. 

In addition to other objects from the Museum collection, the installation is anchored by two significant sets of Dickinson family objects: wallpaper fragments from the poet’s bedroom and pieces of unassembled quilts. Visitors will encounter laser-cut forms echoing the delicate contours of the wallpaper scraps, filled with curated texts spanning centuries, including biographical insights and interpretations of Dickinson’s signature “em” dash, poetically mirrored in the wallpaper’s design.

In the kitchen space, quilt fragments will be paired with shadowboxes and vitrines containing domestic objects from the Museum’s collection.  Paper scraps remaining on the quilt pieces showcase legible text, forming the basis for artistic language collages and found-word poetry.

A final feature will invite audience interaction through a hands-on poetry-making station using words from the papers enclosed in quilt fragments, alongside a video installation featuring community members reading Dickinson’s poetry and reflecting on her enduring legacy.

Artists Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan state,As an artist and poet collaborative team, we’re always looking for ways to explore intersections of text, image, and objects, and the idea of working with the Emily Dickinson Museum seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to delve into a life and body of work that we already found fascinating, especially given that we drive past the poet’s home nearly every day. As we’ve developed the video component of our project–a short film titled “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” that is comprised of community interviews–it’s been really wonderful to speak with so many folks in Amherst and to hear about their own connections to Dickinson’s life and work, and the extent to which her poetry remains a source of ongoing fascination, solace, and inspiration.”

Megan Ramsey, Collections Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum says, “The Museum’s collection had remained largely undocumented and inaccessible up until 2023 when we completed a three-year cataloguing project and published our first online database. It’s thrilling to see that the publication of the collections database directly led to new interpretations of Dickinson’s material life in the form of this exhibition from Bouton and Donovan.”

The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025. Visitors should check in first at the Carriage House. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, August 8, 2025 from 5-7pm ET. 

Learn more about A Something Overtakes the Mind:
https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/a-something-overtakes-the-mind/

For press-approved images:
https://bit.ly/Photos-ASOTM-EDM

ABOUT THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM

The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to sparking the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home.

The Museum comprises two historic houses—the Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens—in the center of Amherst, Mass. that were home to the poet (1830-1886) and members of her immediate family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum was created in 2003 when the two houses merged under the ownership of the Trustees of Amherst College. The Museum is overseen by a separate Board of Governors and is responsible for raising its own operating, program, and capital funds.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and currently divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico in the US.  Her creative work combines sculpture and photography with performance and digital video to recreate appropriated narratives and research drawn from the history of science, literature, and other sources.  Bouton’s recent projects have been shown at museums such as the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.  In 2016, Bouton’s work was featured in the exhibition, “Charlotte Great and Small,” celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England.  Bouton’s video work has been shown at Art Claims Impulse in Berlin, in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nimes, France, and at the Temporary Art Center, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as well as in The Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague.  Reviews of this work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times.  She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant for the opera “Inheritance” which premiered at University of California, San Diego in 2018 and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her project “25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”.  Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Bouton is currently Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks: We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Walden, co-authored with Jenny George, Bull City Press 2025), The Dug-Up Gun Museum (a collection of poems about guns and gun violence in America, BOA 2022), Missing Department (a collaborative collection of art and poetry created with artist Ligia Bouton, Visual Studies Workshop 2023), A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (a book of lyric essays, Trinity University Press 2016), Rapture & the Big Bam (selected by Lia Purpura for the Snowbound Chapbook Competition, Tupelo Press 2016), and Vellum (selected by Mark Doty for the Bakeless Contest, Houghton Mifflin 2007). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon
September 15 – 21

VIRTUAL  and HYBRID Program (see date details below)

Part of the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Poetry Marathon 2025 graphic

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

Wednesday, September 17:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 3, co-hosted with Harvard University’s Houghton 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

Tell-It-Slant-2022-Square-Web-Graphics

Tell It Slant Poetry Festival 2025 Schedule
September 15-21

Thanks for joining us at the 2025 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival! 
Stay tuned for more information about next year’s Festival.

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:

Marathon Part 1 - Tell It Slant 2025 Marathon Part 2-2 - Tell It Slant 2025 The Beauty of Objectivity - Tell It Slant 2025

Putting the Wit in Witness - Tell It Slant 2025 Marathon Part 3 - Tell It Slant 2025 Letters to the World - Tell It Slant 2025

From Blank to Blank - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic The Interior and the Other_ - Tell It Slant 2025 Marathon Part 4 - Tell It Slant 2025

Food & Free Verse - Tell It Slant 2025 Phosphorescence - Tell It Slant 2025 Marathon Part 5 - Tell It Slant 2025

Open Mic - Tell It Slant 2025 Marathon Part 6 - Tell It Slant 2025 Open Me Carefully- Tell It Slant 2025 graphic 

Tea with the Dickinsons- Tell It Slant 2025 Headliner Night - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic Home in a Time of Crisis - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

Paste It Slant_ - Tell It Slant 2025 Poems in the Garden - Tell It Slant 2025 Children’s Book Covers - Tell It Slant 2025

Marathon Part 7 - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

 

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.
3-4pm [Hybrid Talk] — (NEW OFFERING!) Tea with the Dickinsons: An illustrated talk by Executive Director Jane Wald  
Introduced to the European market in the seventeenth-century, trade in tea – and subsequently in coffee and chocolate – became a means of establishing empires and generating the almost frantic consumerism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West. This talk will explore the meanings, settings, and equipment for “taking tea” in Emily Dickinson’s world, including original family objects now in the Museum’s collection.
Featuring Emily Dickinson Museum Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald. 
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.

 

Spring Garden Days 2025
Friday, May 30 & Saturday, May 31

IN-PERSON PROGRAM

“New feet within my garden go –
New fingers stir the sod–”
Fr79

Come celebrate the beauty of spring during Garden Days at the Emily Dickinson Museum! As summer temperatures arrive in Amherst, Emily’s garden begs to be tended. Join Museum staff and fellow volunteers to aid in the cultivation and growth of the historic Dickinson family landscape. During Garden Days, participants will help to weed, divide older perennials, plant new perennials and annuals, edge flower beds, and more! 

DETAILS:
All are welcome; no gardening experience is required. Garden Days runs rain or shine!

Volunteers are encouraged to bring the following if they have them:

  • Gloves
  • Clean hand trowel and clippers
  • Bucket
  • Kneeling pad
  • Water bottle
  • Comfortable footwear
  • Sun protection
  • Small plant pot(s)
  • Lunch (if you are staying for the whole day)

Garden Days spots are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Space is limited. This program is run over the course of two days, and participants may choose up to two of the following sessions:

Session 1: Friday, May 30, 9:30am – 12:30pm ET (Full)

Session 2: Friday, May 30,  1:30pm – 4:30pm ET

Session 3: Saturday, May 31, 9:30am – 12:30pm ET (Full)

Session 4: Saturday, May 31, 1:30pm – 4:30pm ET

Volunteers are encouraged to stay for the duration of their session. Those under the age of 18 should be accompanied by an adult.

This in-person program is free to attend. Registration is required. 

REGISTER

the Homestead lights are on at night time

Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series 2025

a banner for PHOSPHORESCENCE Contemporary Poetry Series

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. 

The 2025 Series is a FREE virtual program. Join us on Zoom each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.

Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence 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 our programs. All gifts are tax deductible.
 
For more information on our upcoming Phosphorescence Readings, sign up for our e-newsletter.
 

Phosphorescence 2025 Schedule:

graphic for Phos April 2025Thursday, April 17, 6pm ET

Featuring poets: Carlene Kucharczyk, Avia Tadmor, and Silvia Bonilla

 

 

 

 

graphic Phos May 2025Thursday, May 15, 6pm ET

Featuring poets: Joy Ladin, Niina Pollari, and Joan Larkin

 

 

 

 

 

graphic Phos June 2025Wednesday, June 18, 6pm ET

Featuring poets: Barbara Mossberg, Bridget Lowe, and Rachelle Toarmino

 

 

 

 

 

graphic Phos July 2025Thursday, July 17, 6pm ET

Featuring poets: Lesley Wheeler and Nadia Alexis

 

 

 

 

 

graphic Phos August 2025Thursday, August 21, 6pm ET

Featuring poets: Cathy Linh Che, Monica Ong, and Lee Ann Roripaugh

 

 

 

 

 

graphic Phos September 2025Thursday, September 18, 6pm ET

Featuring poets: Livia Meneghin, Meg Day, and Rajiv Mohabir

 

 

 

 

 
 

Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence 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 our programs. All gifts are tax deductible.

 

Logo for PHOSPHORESCENCE reading series featuring the Homestead glowing at night

Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series
Thursday, September 18, 6pm ET

Phosphorescence September 2025 featured poets:
Livia Meneghin, Meg Day, and Rajiv Mohabir

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants. ASL interpretation provided. Symbol for ASL interpretation

 

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

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.


About this month’s poets:

headshot of poet Livia Meneghin

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and feathering. She’s been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review’s Peseroff Prize, The Room’s Poetry Contest, and the Writers’ Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Homes where you can find her writing include in CV2, Gasher, Mom Egg Review, Osmosis, Thrush. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing, and is the Reads Editor at Sundress Publications. She is a cancer survivor.

liviameneghin.wordpress.com

 

 


headshot of poet Meg DayDeaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Day is the 2024 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at NC State.

megday.com

 

 

 


headshot of poet Rajiv MohabirPoet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

rajivmohabir.com

 

 


The September Phosphorescence moderator is Stephanie Choi, whose poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and published in 2024. She was the 2023-24 Poet-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South and one of Poets and Writers Magazine’s Debut Poets of 2024. She is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches creative writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels. 


Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence 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 our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.

 

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

Logo for PHOSPHORESCENCE reading series featuring the Homestead glowing at night

Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series
Thursday, August 21, 6pm ET

Phosphorescence August 2025 featured poets:
Cathy Linh Che, Monica Ong, and Lee Ann Roripaugh

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

This virtual program is free to attend. Registration is required. 

REGISTER

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.


About this month’s poets:

headshot of poet Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). She is working on a creative nonfiction manuscript on her parents’ experiences as refugees who played extras on Apocalypse Now. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her documentary short We Were the Scenery is premiering at Sundance in 2025.

cathylinhche.com

 

 


Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide including Amherst College. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow in Writing.

monicaong.com

 

 


headshot of poet Lee Ann RoripaughLee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released from Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.

leeannroripaugh.net

 

 


Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence 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 our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.

Logo for PHOSPHORESCENCE reading series featuring the Homestead glowing at night

Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series
Thursday, July 17, 6pm ET

Phosphorescence July 2025 featured poets:
Lesley Wheeler and Nadia Alexis

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

This virtual program is free to attend and will be streamed live from the Homestead. Registration is required. 

REGISTER

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.


About this month’s poets:

headshot of Lesley Wheeler

Lesley Wheeler, Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, is the author of Mycocosmic (March 2025), runner-up for the Dorset Prize and her sixth poetry collection. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and two books of poetry scholarship, the first of which, The Poetics of Enclosure, roots its arguments in Dickinson’s work. Wheeler’s writing has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop; her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Poets & Writers, Kenyon Review Online, Ecotone, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

lesleywheeler.org

 

 

 


headshot of poet Nadia AlexisNadia Alexis is a poet, writer, and photographer born and raised in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants, and she currently resides in Mississippi. Her debut full-length collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed, is forthcoming with CavanKerry Press in March 2025, and it was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Her writing and photography have been published widely, and she has received several awards and honors including a 2025 Literary Arts Fellowship and a 2024 Artist Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a 2024 Mississippi STAR Teacher Award, a 2024 Vance Fellowship from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the 2023 Poet of the Year Honoree of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a semifinalist position in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, a nomination for the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award, and an honorable mention prize in the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award for poetry. Nadia’s photography has been exhibited in several shows in the U.S., Cuba, and virtually. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, The Watering Hole, and the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Publicity Incubator, she holds a PhD and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi.

bynadiaalexis.com

 


Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:
Admission to all Phosphorescence 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 our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.