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:
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.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.
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.
This 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! 
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. We will read Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, and each presenter’s work, and explore the intersections between them.
What 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).
Follow Emily Dickinson’s example by writing letters “to the World” in a virtual workshop with epistolary fantasy author Sylvie Cathrall. In this gentle and good-humored 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 – open to all writers (and sometimes-writers, first-time-writers, letter-writers, and everyone else, too!). 
In Dickinson, we meet a speaker who sees Death as a kindly chauffeur and notes the flies buzzing around their deathbed. In these and other remarkable poems, Dickinson upends the heaviness of confronting our own mortality. She situates the speaker as a witness whose playfulness, wit, and sarcasm defuses the volatility of the moment – and helps renew the reader’s perspective. 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.
This workshop provides beginning poets with a framework for analyzing poetry with an objective approach centered on craft elements. With an eye toward formalism, this workshop centers on a streamlined infographic to help writers objectively analyze and discuss any poem — from ancient to contemporary — at the level of craft and technique. Participants will analyze Dickinson’s poems and contemporary examples, and they will generate and analyze their own poetry in response to Dickinson-centered prompts. The key focus of this workshop is for writers to view any poem objectively and ask not: “Is this poem good or bad?” but “What is this poem doing?”.
The Carriage House achieves this through five core principles:
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Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor-in-chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.