VIRTUAL WORKSHOP — 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 is for all writers to explore the meaningful relationship between protest and power. With the rise of protests in today’s society, writers can use their craft as a tool of resistance and collective action. This diverse panel with Black, Puerto Rican, activist writers and professors of literature in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will share helpful writing strategies and prompts for writers to incorporate protest into their writing and daily craft practices. Through a series of prompts and sample poems, the audience will leave the workshop with at least one draft of a new poem.About the presenters
Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award, Eric Hoffer Award, Whirling Prize, and Da Vinci Eye Award, reviewed by Publishers Weekly, and recommended by Ms. Magazine. She is a Poetry Editor at The Hopper and Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She has received support from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and SWWIM.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home, Kinds of Grace, Neon Steel, and VERSUS. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo, and Sundress. Her work is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and must-read by Elle, Bookshop, and Latinx in Publishing. She is a fiction editor at Pleiades and an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
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.