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!
Enjoy short readings and discussion in response to the idea that poetry acts as filter and sponge for the world to enter, reveal, and inspire. What meanings are our words saturated with, and where does that discovery lead? When do environmental, historical, and sociopolitical realities flood the page? How does the body’s experience of writing impact the poetry itself? At this panel, poets Oliver Baez Bendorf, Patrycja Humienik, and Livia Meneghin will share poetry in response to these understandings of porosity and discuss living within and between language, when and how poetry can surprise us, and even where Emily Dickinson’s poetry serves as example.About the presenters
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is a poet, artist, and author of three collections, most recently Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the Lambda Award for Transgender Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he has taught for over 15 years in programs including the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He currently lives and works in exile, where he leads the Field Notes from Exile workshop series.
Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is the author of We Contain Landscapes (Tin House), selected as a New York Public Library Best New Poetry Book of 2025. An editor and teaching artist, Patrycja has developed writing and movement workshops for Arts+Literature Laboratory, Poets House, The Seventh Wave, Brooklyn Poets, Northwest Film Forum, Henry Art Gallery, and in prisons. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Slowdown Show, and elsewhere.
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.