The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –
Fr598
Have an idea for a workshop, author’s talk, art exhibition, performance, or other program to take place at, or in conjunction with, the Emily Dickinson Museum?
Please complete the proposal form below to tell us about your idea and how you want to serve and inspire public audiences.
Programs that are a good fit will realize or help further the Museum’s mission to spark the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home. Before submitting, please familiarize yourself with the Museum’s annual public programs. Proposed programs may be invited to occur as stand-alone events that add to the Museum’s breadth of offerings in a given year, or to be featured as a part of a pre-existing program. Submissions for in-person or virtual programs are welcome.
Timeline: We recommend submitting a proposal at least 1 year in advance of your ideal presentation time. We may not be able to consider programs occurring within a 6-month window from the time of submission. Program submissions are reviewed quarterly. A staff member from the Museum’s program team will respond to you after the submission has been reviewed.
Regular public programming at the Museum includes:
- Tell it Slant Poetry Festival & the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon
- Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series
- Poetry Discussion Group
- Educator Workshop Series
- Poetry Walk
- Garden Days
- Birthday Open House
- Virtual Birthday Celebration
- And more!
Annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival (September) & Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series (April-September)
The Museum seeks proposals for these two programs through a separate annual call for submissions each winter. To apply for Phosphorescence or the Festival, wait until this call for submissions has been announced. Please do not use the general form below to express interest in these programs. Current calls for submissions can be found under Upcoming Events. Subscribe to the e-newsletter so you don’t miss the announcement!
Questions? Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org.
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. 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.
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. 
In 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.
Join 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.
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? 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.
Callie 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?
Emily 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.