Open Me CarefullyDickinson’s Legacy of CorrespondenceSaturday, 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:

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Open Me Carefully- Tell It Slant 2025 graphic

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.

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.

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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