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 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!
Join us for the 12th 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:
Just what does a Poet Laureate do? You have questions and we have answers! Two poets from New England will share their poetic work as well as discuss the programs they implemented for their own communities. They will also discuss how they became Poet Laureates, what kinds of opportunities are available through their positions, as well as what sort of pitfalls are present in navigating the role of public poet.
About the Poets
OLIVER DE LA PAZ is the author and editor of several books and serves as the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA. His latest collection of poetry, The Diaspora Sonnets, was published by Liveright Press (2023). It was a winner of the 2023 New England Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. A founding member of Kundiman, he teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
oliverdelapaz.com
diannelyantigua.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.
From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a subject that haunts you. We will be looking at how to write and sustain work within a singular focus, obsession, or motif. This workshop introduces poems and works paired with exercises that allow the writer to be haunted by a subject, inviting writers to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that find themselves, suddenly facing the ghosts that visit them frequently. Ultimately, we will look to lines from Dickinson that declare:
Like us, Emily Dickinson lived in a time of ecological change and painful civil conflict. Against this backdrop, Dickinson’s poems reach out to the world around her—the frog, the snake, the hummingbird, train, “slant of light,” even the “loaded gun,” addressing these others as companions, fellow witnesses. In this panel, poets Carolina Ebeid, Julia Guez, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Tess Taylor will explore both Dickinson’s and their own dialogues with the nonhuman. The poets will read poems by Dickinson in conversation with each other’s work to plumb that site in which “surpassing/Material Place—” we might instead “Dwell in Possibility.” We follow with writing prompts and conversation.
Emily Dickinson’s poems interact with silence to open spaces of questioning, recognition, and keen attention to spiritual matters and questions of meaning. In this workshop, we’ll place our own poetry in the context of Dickinson’s poetry, offer a short guided meditation and generative prompts for participants to explore their own relation to silence, voice, and spiritual attention.
SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!
Facilitators will lead participants in a series of generative writing exercises using personal family and ancestral history as creative inspiration and content. The workshop will allow time for writing and limited time for sharing excerpts in breakout rooms. Participants will leave the workshop with at least two writing sketches and other writing resources to continue developing their ideas and creatively archiving their own family histories.
For any questions, please e-mail 
Born in Southern California, Al Salehi is a multilingual American poet and entrepreneur of Persian descent who lives in Orange County with a background in technology. Al graduated from UCLA and went on to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Al is a graduate from Dartmouth College’s Guarini Graduate School where he studied Creative Writing, and currently serves on the Alumni Council. He also completed a creative writing program at the University of Oxford, Exeter College. Al’s short film Love, Basketball won second place in the My Hero International Film Festival, 2021, under the “Poetry” category. He has published and/or presented poetry in the Society of Classical Poets, The Dartmouth Writers Society, The United Nations Association, Southwest Airlines, O.C. Registrar, Dartmouth Leslie Center Lifeline’s Poetry Share, Houston Library Poetry Share, Clamantis Journal, and the Dartmouth Medical School Lifeline’s Journal. Al’s collection, Enter Atlas, was a Semi-Finalist for the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, judged by Natasha Trethewey.