VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants
This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required.
Part of the 2026 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!
Join us for the 14th annual Tell it Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum!
This workshop will offer three perspectives from Japanese literature—haiku, tanka and haibun—in connection to Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Acclaimed craftswomen of these forms will share a wide range of example works including 10th-century zuihitsu, poems by a 19th-century Japanese female poet (a contemporary of Emily Dickinson), haiku based on the African American experience, as well as their own work inspired by respective examples. The audience will be given writing prompts and invited to share their works and discuss.About the presenters
Miho Kinnas, poet and translator, is the author of three poetry collections and collaborative books of poetry. Her work is anthologized in Best American Poetry, Voice&Verse: Asian Literary Journals’ 10th and 20th Anniversary Issues. She writes book reviews and essays for American Book Review, World Literature Today, and Re-Markings. She teaches poetry at Writers.com, Pat Conroy Literary Center, and New York Writers Workshop. She speaks at Hobart Festival of Women Writers (2025 & 2026.)
Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025) winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, and Frogpond. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.
Holly Thompson is the author of three acclaimed verse novels for young people — Orchards; The Language Inside; and Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth — as well as poetry picture books including her biography in haibun form Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker (Neal Porter Books, 2024). She divides her time between Japan and the U.S. and teaches creative writing at Yokohama City University and GrubStreet Boston.
Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival
The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is sustained by the Emily Dickinson Fund, which provides critical, unrestricted support for the Museum’s day-to-day operations. Your generous donation helps us offer immersive poetry programs to a global audience and preserve the historic Dickinson legacy in Amherst. As the Fund supplies 36% of our annual budget, your tax-deductible contribution is essential to our mission. Join us in inspiring learners of all ages by making an immediate impact today.
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
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.