Tea with the Dickinsons- Tell It Slant 2025

Tea with the Dickinsons
An illustrated talk by Executive Director Jane Wald
Saturday, September 20, 3pm 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


Tea with the Dickinsons- Tell It Slant 2025Introduced 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. Emily Dickinson and her family delighted in these exotic imported beverages and, like the rest of New England, acquired the requisite material goods to make and serve tea, coffee, and chocolate in their own family circle and for their guests. 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.
 
An illustrated talk by Emily Dickinson Museum Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald.
 


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

 
Children’s Book Covers - Tell It Slant 2025

Children’s Book Covers
Diving Boards Into Our Imagination
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM — at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA

This is a paid program. Registration is required to attend. 
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


Children’s Book Covers - Tell It Slant 2025Beginner 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.
 
María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado was born in Puerto Rico & raised in Springfield, MA, and has earned degrees in German, her third language. She writes poems that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German, & Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her latest collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (2024) & Resistencia: Resilience (2023). For 20+ years, she has been joyfully facilitating poetry workshops including at the WriteAngles Conference & Mass Poetry Festival. earned degrees in German, her third language. She writes poems that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German, & Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her latest collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (2024) & Resistencia: Resilience (2023). For 20+ years, she has been joyfully facilitating poetry workshops including at the WriteAngles Conference & Mass Poetry Festival.


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

 
Poems in the Garden - Tell It Slant 2025

Poems in the Garden
A Poetry Workshop with The WildStory Podcast
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM — at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA

This is a paid program. Registration is required to attend. 
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


Poems in the Garden - Tell It Slant 2025In a time of ecological crisis and increased disconnection from nature, poets create vital space to honor and reflect upon the natural world, with its joys and its losses. 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.
 
Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, NJ and author of two poetry collections: Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024) and Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag, 2019). Wallace hosts and produces The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. A poet, memoirist, and illness advocate, she is Professor of English at New Jersey City University.
 
Elizabeth Sylvia lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English. Elizabeth’s first book, None But Witches (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has two books forthcoming: a chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Oddities from Ballerini Press in 2025 and a full-length collection Scythe, exploring Marie Antoinette and the end of the world, from River River Books in 2026.


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

 
Paste It Slant_ - Tell It Slant 2025

Paste It Slant
A Collage Poetry Workshop
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

IN-PERSON PROGRAM — at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA

This is a paid program. Registration is required to attend. 
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


Paste It Slant_ - Tell It Slant 2025Join us 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. You will walk away with seeds of poems, deeper knowledge and experience with a visual art form, and a found poetry technique to help you — in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson — “tell all the truth but tell it slant “! All levels of experience with poetry and visual art are welcome.
 
Leticia Priebe Rocha is the author of In Lieu of Heartbreak, This is Like (Bottlecap Press, 2024). She earned her bachelor’s from Tufts University and was awarded the 2020 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she grew up in Miami, FL and resides in the Greater Boston area. Her work has been published in Salamander, Rattle, and elsewhere. Leticia is also an Editorial Associate for Yellow Arrow Publishing.


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

 
Home in a Time of Crisis - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

Home in a Time of Crisis
New Poets from Poetry Wales
Sunday, September 21, 10am ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — 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


Home in a Time of Crisis - Tell It Slant 2025 graphicWhere 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? Head editor and chair Zoë Brigley presents three brilliant new editors from the magazine Poetry Wales: Kandace Siobhan Walker, Tangie Mitchell and Zakia Carpenter-Hall. These rising poetry stars will talk about where they find comfort, reading classic poems such as “Hope” is the thing with feathers’ alongside less well known Dickinson poems and their own work.
 
Zoë Brigley is a Welsh American poet, essayist, editor, and curator whose work spans poetry, translation, nonfiction, and interdisciplinary art. Her three full-length poetry collections—Hand & SkullConquest, and The Secret published by Bloodaxe—have all been named UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She received an Eric Gregory Award for outstanding British poets under 30, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and was commended by the Forward Prize. In 2025, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Ohio, and an Artist’s Project Grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Zoë is the editor of Poetry Wales. poetrywales.co.uk

Zakia Carpenter-Hall is an American writer, tutor and critic living in the UK. Her poetry reviews and poems have both been published in Poetry Wales, The Poetry Review, Wild Court, Magma and elsewhere. She’s also had multiple reviews appear in Poetry London and on the Poetry School’s website. Human Ecologies (2021) is her ecopoetry film commissioned by The Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival and Obsidian Foundation. She was the editorial intern for Magma 82 Obsidian, a former Poetry London mentee, Jerwood Bursary Recipient and London Library Emerging Writer. She has taught creative writing courses at Kingston University, Royal Holloway University of London and the Poetry School. zakiacarpenterhall.com

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee and Welsh heritage. Her work explores ideas and themes of speculative futures, anti-capitalism, popular culture, digital media, abolitionist ecologies and folk spiritualities knowledges. As a multidisciplinary artist, she works with video, painting, textiles, sound and installation. She is represented by Abi Fellows at DHH Literary Agency. She lives in London. kandace.co.uk

Tangie Mitchell is a poet, editor, and collage artist. Born and raised in North Carolina, her work centers personal and collective histories of the Black American South, among other subjects. Tangie earned a BA in Political Science from Spelman College and an MFA in Writing (Poetry) from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been featured in Poetry Wales, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, West Trade Review, Berlin Lit, Exposition Review, and more. A Watering Hole Poetry Fellow and an alum of the UK-based Obsidian Foundation, her work has also earned Best of The Net and Robert Siegel Prize nominations and has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and other arts institutions. She was a Spring 2024 Contributing Editor for Poetry Wales Issue 59.3: Home in a Time of Ecological Emergency. Tangie lives in Brooklyn with a growing collection of 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s funk/r&b/soul memorabilia. tangiemitchell.com



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

 
Thank You For The Surgery”_- Tell It Slant 2025

Thank You For The Surgery
The Poet-Editor Relationship
Saturday, September 20, 3:30pm 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


Thank You For The Surgery”_- Tell It Slant 2025Callie 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?
 
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of PROMPT. She lives in California.

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.

 
Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e))
 


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 Me Carefully- Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

Open Me Carefully
Dickinson’s Legacy of Correspondence
Saturday, September 20, 1pm 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 Me Carefully- Tell It Slant 2025 graphicEmily Dickinson is known to have written more than a thousand intimate and poetic letters in her lifetime. What fueled these correspondences, and how did these correspondences fuel Dickinson’s creative mind? In this workshop, poets Nicole Callihan, Tina Cane, Caitlin Grace McDonnell, and Zoë Ryder White 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. This generative writing—if Nerve not be denied!—will be shared.
 
Caitlin Grace McDonnell, a former New York Times Foundation and Fine Arts Work Center fellow, has published two books (Looking for Small Animals 2012 and Pandemic City 2021, both from Nauset Press) and a chapbook (Dreaming the Tree 2003 from belladonna). Her poems and essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Braving the Body (2024) and Poetry is Bread (upcoming). She teaches writing and lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.

Nicole Callihan, winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize and a 2023 Alma Award, 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.

 
Tina Cane is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, and served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (2016-2024). A 2020 fellow with the Academy of American Poets, Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, Body of Work, and Year of the Murder Hornet. Creator/curator of the distance series Poetry is Bread, and editor of Poetry is Bread: The Anthology, Cane has also published two verse novels for younger readers, Alma Presses Play and Are You Nobody Too? (Penguin/ Random House).
 
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her first full-length collection, The Visible Field, is forthcoming from River River Books in early 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring and Elsewhere with Nicole Callihan. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.


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

 

Food & Free Verse
A Celebration of Food Through Poetry
Thursday, September 18, 3pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — 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


Food & Free Verse_ - Tell It Slant 2025This is a unique poetry generative writing workshop for writers of all levels. We will meditate on different ways to perceive the way food nourishes the soul, just like a poem does: through memory and survival, through gratitude, through synesthesia, through love languages and through socio-economic commentary. Join us and leave with at least one solid poem draft!
 
Vasvi Kejriwal is a writer and former lawyer. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and shortlisted for the Troubadour Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in Shō Poetry Journal, Rattle, Nimrod International Journal, SWWIM Everyday, Mekong Review, Usawa Literary Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine and elsewhere. She launched ‘Poem Remedies’ which made its debut at Soho House Mumbai.

Saranya Subramanian completed her MFA at the University of San Francisco. Her writing has been published in The Caravan, Aainanagar, Outlook, Vayavya, The Bombay Review––among others. Her essay, “The Cockroach and I”, was published by Penguin Random House and won runner up to the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. She runs The Bombay Poetry Crawl (which has been featured in the New York Times), an archival space dedicated to 20th century Bombay Poets.



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

 
The Interior and the Other_ - Tell It Slant 2025

The Interior and the Other
on poetic and psychic transformation
Wednesday, September 17, 7:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — 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


The Interior and the Other_ - Tell It Slant 2025What 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. We will read Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, and each presenter’s work, and explore the intersections between them.
 
Ayelet Amittay is the author of The Eating Knife (Fernwood Press 2025). Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and others. She is a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Oregon.

Dana Levin is the author of five books poetry. Her latest is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon), a 2022 New York Times Notable Book and NPR “Book We Love.” She is a grateful recipient of honors from the NEA, PEN, the Library of Congress, and the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin teaches for the Bennington Writing Seminars and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.



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

 
From Blank to Blank - Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

From Blank to Blank
How and Why to Use Blackout Poetry
Wednesday, September 17, 4:30pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — 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


From Blank to Blank - Tell It Slant 2025 graphicWhat do acts of erasure afford a writer? How can blackout poetry be used to create community, unlock writer’s block, or clap back? The reasons for engaging in an erasure of a text can range from playful engagements with the literary canon, to political reclamations of voice and language. 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. Participants will leave the workshop with prompts, tools of erasure, and recommended readings. Featuring Matt Donovan and Jenny George, authors of We Are Not Where We Are: an erasing of Thoreau’s Walden (Bull City Press, 2025).
 
Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks, including, most recently, The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA) and Missing Department (Visual Studies Workshop), a collection of poetry and art made in collaboration with the artist Ligia Bouton. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason and After Image, both from Copper Canyon Press, as well as the chapbook * (Bull City Press). She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.



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