Hybrid Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Join us for the week-long Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon! An Emily Dickinson Museum tradition, the Marathon is a group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this year’s hybrid Festival, some sessions will take place in-person and others online. For the Marathon, we will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition.

Marathon session times and reader sign-ups are located in the Festival platform on Sched. To access the platform, register for the Festival and look for your e-mail confirmation containing the link to Sched.

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To attend any Marathon session online as a listener, please register for the Festival using the link above, and add the session to your schedule. To reserve a spot as a reader, please use the forms linked below.

Reader sign-up forms for in-person sessions:

Saturday, Sept. 24 10am-12pm

Sunday, Sept. 25 1:30-4:30pm

Reader sign-up forms for virtual sessions:

Wednesday, Sept. 21 2-4pm

Thursday, Sept. 22 7:30-9:30pm

Friday, Sept. 23 12-2pm

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

In-Person Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Does the translation of a poem “tell it slant”? Do translators aim to tell the truth, but not the whole truth? What truths are uncovered when poems are given a new language? Do translators who are fluent in the language “uncover,” while those who may be just learning “discover”? In this session, panelists speak about their process of translating poetry and their relationship with truth-making, as well as read from their recently published translations. This program is brought to you by Festival partner, Massachusetts Center for the Book.

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About the poets:

Danielle Legros Georges is a creative and critical writer, translator, and academic whose work sits in the fields of contemporary U.S. poetry, Black and African-diasporic poetry and literature, Caribbean/Latin American and Haitian studies, and literary translation. She is the author of several books of poetry including Maroon (2001), The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), and Island Heart (2021) translations of the poems of 20th-century Haitian-French poet Ida Faubert. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and contained in artistic commissions and collaborations. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Boston in 2014 and served in the role from 2015 through 2019. She is a professor of creative writing at Lesley University.

Ilan Stavans‘ book Selected Translations: Poems 2000-2020 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) features about 100 translations he did over two decades from about 20 different languages, including languages he doesn’t know. Emily Dickinson’s line “Tell it slant” serves as the volume’s epigraph; there are also poems by her included that he translated into Spanish. His conviction is that translation is a process whereby a poem is “reborn” in a new habitat and that such rebirth forces us to recalibrate the way we read the original poem as well.

Dr. Regina Galasso is a writer, translator, and educator. Her award-winning scholarly work highlights the role of translation in literary histories and contemporary culture. Her forthcoming publications include This Is a Classic: Translators on Making Writers Global. She creates and supports ways to promote translation education to encourage greater understanding of this needed service and intellectual activity. With her students, she curated the 2022 exhibition “Read the World: Picture Books and Translation” for the Reading Library at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. She works with school districts to improve their language access services and initiatives. She is Director of the Translation Center and Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and can be reached at rgalasso@umass.edu.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Virtual Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Elmore Leonard famously suggested that writers use 1-2 exclamation points per 100,000 words of writing. Theodor Adorno called the exclamation point “intolerable.” Emily Dickinson used around 384 exclamation points in her collected work, and her wielding of this controversial mark has provided an exemplary model of how poets might add a note of ecstasy and death-consciousness into their writing. In this workshop, we will begin by discussing three primary modes in which exclamation points appear in contemporary poetry and then segue into a series of light-hearted and serious writing exercises centered around this piece of punctuation.

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About the poet:

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novels Sadness Is a White Bird (Atria, 2018) for which he received the National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ Honor, and Before All the World, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 11, 2022. His poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, The New York Times, The Paris Review’s Daily, Zyzzyva and elsewhere, and he is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships for Literature, and a Bennington Writing Seminars Donald Hall Scholarship for Poets.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Hybrid Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

UPDATE: 9/24 3PM: Please note Tyehimba Jess will not be able to be with us tonight due to an emergency. Our thoughts are with him and we hope to be able to find a way to bring him to the Museum in the near future. Matt Donovan will take the stage to read from his new book alongside Sumita Chakraborty this evening.

Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry!  Here to kick off the evening, celebrated artist Lesley Dill and filmmaker Ed Robbins share a glimpse of Divide Light, an Emily Dickinson opera, visual art, and film collaboration. Then our featured headlining poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Tyhemiba Jess and  Sumita Chakraborty read from their work and discuss their poetic practice and inspiration with facilitator Matt Donovan.  Stay for in-person music, refreshments, and a book signing to follow. 

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About Divide Light:

Divide Light is an opera collaboration by Originator/Creative Director Lesley Dill and Composer Richard Marriott, and captured in film by Ed Robbins. It contemporizes the works of poet Emily Dickinson, linking the groundbreaking ideas of the mid-19th century American Transcendental movement to innovations and global concerns in today’s rapidly changing world. 

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. She is the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 Tell it Slant Award. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze, and music—works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In April 2018 the New Camerata Opera Company performed a restaged version in New York City, which was captured in a full-length film by Ed Robbins. Dill’s artworks are in the collections of over fifty museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has had over a hundred solo exhibitions. Dill lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ed Robbins is an award winning Director-Writer-Producer and Digital Journalist. Drawn to stories of individuals in the face of adversity, he’s travelled extensively across America and internationally. The topics have ranged from social justice, crime, frontline war, the environment, human rights, religion, science, to the performing and visual arts. He’s written-produced numerous hour programs for television outlets that include PBS, Discovery Channel, TLC, Nat Geo Channel, ABC, NBC, and in the UK: BBC2 and Channel 4. 

About the poets:

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.  

Jess’ fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020), which received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, is in progress and under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press.

Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her essays most frequently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and elsewhere.

Sumita is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Previously, she held the positions of Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her courses have been cross-listed in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Environmental Studies; recent offerings include undergraduate courses such as “Writing in a Time of Extinction,” “Conversations with Dead People,” “The Personal, The Political, and The Poetic,” and “Unruly Feelings,” which are upper-level literary studies seminars, as well as graduate courses on topics such as “Reading Archives: Gaps, Margins, Erasures,” “Poetry and Research,” “On Failure,” and the Thesis Workshop in Poetry.

She is a proud alumna of Wellesley College, where she received her BA, and she received her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman fellow, and has been shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK). Formerly, she was poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length. Current or more recent editorial work includes reading for the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing and curating the May 2021 selections for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, as well as serving on the board of Alice James Books (joined in 2021).

Facilitator:

Matt Donovan is the author of three collections of poetry—The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022), Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017), and Vellum (Mariner 2007)—as well as the book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. In 2017, he received a Creative Capital Grant for Inheritance, a collaborative multimedia chamber opera based on the life of Sarah Winchester. Donovan serves as Director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. 

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Virtual Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Some readings of Dickinson’s poetics focus negatively on her potential writings about disability (from agoraphobia to Bright’s Disease), but this panel follows Dickinson critic Michael Davidson who takes a more radical Disability Studies stance, asking what gifts might be found in experiences of disability. This panel, organized by Poetry Wales editor Zoe Brigley, foregrounds work around disability and the experience of pain or chronic illness, featuring international poets who recently appeared in Poetry Wales’ special issue including Cy. Jillian Weise, Claudine Toutoungi, Hannah Hodgson, and Samuel Tongue.

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About the poets:

Zoë Brigley is the author of three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007), and recently published chapbooks with Broken Sleep: Aubade After A French Movie (2020), and Verve: Into Eros (2021). She also wrote a collection of nonfiction essays Notes from a Swing State (Parthian 2019) and co-wrote a pamphlet of creative nonfiction with Kristian Evans, Otherworlds: Writing on Nature and Magic (Broken Sleep 2021). Brigley is Assistant Professor in English at the Ohio State University where she produces an anti-violence podcast: “Sinister Myth”. She won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, was Forward Prize commended, and listed in the Dylan Thomas Prize.

The Cyborg Jillian Weise is a regular writer for the New York Times and author of Cyborg Detective (Boa 2019) and An Amputee’s Guide to Sex (Soft Skull reprint 2017).

Hannah Hodgson is an English writer and activist living with a terminal illness; she has worked with BBC Arts and Teen Vogue, received a prestigious Princess Diana Legacy Award, and recently published her debut collection 162 Days (Seren 2022).

Claudine Toutoungi is an award-winning playwright and poet, author of Two Tongues (Carcenet 2020), and her bittersweet drama about a relationship sparked in an ocular prosthetics clinic, Slipping, was selected for New York’s Lark Play Centre’s international HotINK series.

Scotland-based writer, Samuel Tongue, also explores sight in his poetry; he is author of Sacrifice Zones (Red Squirrel 2020), was poetry editor at the Glasgow Review of Books for six years and also co-edited New Writing Scotland for 3 issues.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

In-Person Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (Oxford University Press, 2022)  is designed to engage, inform, interest, and delight students and scholars of Emily Dickinson, US literature, and the lyric poem. This is the first collection on Dickinson to foreground the material and social culture of her era while opening new windows to interpretive possibility in ours, balancing Dickinson’s own material culture and historical context with the critical conversations in our present –  as she wrote, “Forever is composed of Nows.” 

Scholars, poets, and artists who contributed to the Handbook join editors Dr. Cristanne Miller and Dr. Karen Sánchez-Eppler in conversation and celebration. Join this esteemed gathering to consider debates about Dickinson’s manuscripts and practices of composition, the viability of translation across language and media, and about the politics of class, gender, place, and race. Refreshments will be served.

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Panelists:

Karen Sánchez-Eppler: Karen Sánchez-Eppler is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (Oxford University Press, 2022) and author of the included essay, “Except the smaller size –”: Aunt Emily’s Poetry. Sánchez-Eppler is L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College and serves on the boards of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation and of the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her first book, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993), included work on Dickinson. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005) initiated her turn to childhood studies. She is one of the founding coeditors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and past president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Cristanne Miller: Cristanne Miller is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson (Oxford University Press, 2022) and author of the included essay, Writing for Posterity: Editing, Evidence, and Sequence in Dickinson’s Composition and Circulation of Poems. Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY. She has published broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Her books on Dickinson include Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987), Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and the edition Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016), winner of the Modern Language Association’s Best Scholarly Edition Prize. She serves on the editorial advisory board for the Emily Dickinson Archive and is currently coediting a new complete letters of Emily Dickinson with Domhnall Mitchell. Among other work on modernist poetry, Miller is founder and director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. 

Lisa Brooks: Lisa Brooks is author of Whose Native Place? The Dickinsons and the Colonization of the Connecticut River Valley in the Oxford Handbook. Brooks is an Abenaki writer and scholar who lives and works in the Kwinitekw Valley. She is Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College. Known for her extensive archival research and place-based scholarship, Brooks is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018), which received several awards, including the Bancroft Prize for American History and Diplomacy and the New England Society Book Award for Historical Nonfiction in 2019.

Claire Nashar: Claire Nashar is author of “The Pedigree of Honey”: Class, Colony, and Politics in Amherst’s “Beehive” and Dickinson’s Bee Poems in the Oxford Handbook. Nashar recently earned her PhD in English from the State University of New York, Buffalo, supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Winner of an Excellence in Teaching Award, she has published a book of poems, Lake (2016), and a number of interviews, translations, poems, and two critical essays. She edited a special issue of Formes Poétiques Contemporaines and is at work on a book-length translation from the French. Nashar has served as curator of the online Australian Poetry Library and as Project Editor and Manager for the Marianne Moore Digital Archive.

Jane H. Wald: Jane Wald is author of A Short Biography of the Homestead and The Evergreens in the Oxford Handbook. Wald has been executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum for over twenty years. Wald is the Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her work at the museum has included operational integration of the Homestead and The Evergreens, expansion of the museum’s program and audiences, and completion of numerous restoration and capital projects. Her published articles have focused on the material and cultural contexts of Dickinson’s environment, including “ ‘The Poet Hunters’: How Emily Dickinson’s House Became a Destination” for the Emily Dickinson Journal, “ ‘Pretty Much Real Life’: The Material World of the Dickinson Family” for the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson, and “ ‘Better than Heaven’: Emily Dickinson’s Religious Texts” for the Emily Dickinson Archive.

Nan Wolverton: Nan Wolverton is author of “The Wanderers came last Night”: Dickinson and the Material Culture of Indigenous Basket Sellers in the Oxford Handbook. Wolverton is Interim Vice President for Programs at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. At the Society she also is Director of Fellowships and Director of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. Wolverton has published widely on early American material and visual culture, including in Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth-Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives (2019). She served as Curator of Decorative Arts at Old Sturbridge Village and as a Lecturer in American Studies at Smith College and at Amherst College. Her projects as a material culture and humanities consultant, include those at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, Historic Deerfield, Inc., the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Wolverton prepared the online catalog of Dickinson family artifacts for Harvard’s Emily Dickinson Collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Mary Loeffelholz: Mary Loeffelholz is author of “Yellow Noise”: Information and Form in Dickinson’s Intermedial Writing in the Oxford Handbook. Loeffelholz is Professor of English at Northeastern University. Her work on Dickinson includes Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (1991), From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2004), The Value of Emily Dickinson (2016), and the Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson, coedited with Martha Nell Smith (2007), as well as essays and book chapters published in The Emily Dickinson Journal, ELH, Dickinson Electronic Archive, and Emily Dickinson in Context (edited by Eliza Richards, 2013). She served as editor of Studies in American Fiction from 1993 to 2008 and as editor of Volume D, 1914–1945, of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, editions 7 (2007), 8 (2011) and 9 (2016).

Maurice Lee: Maurice Lee is author of Dickinson Uncut: Reading and Not Reading in Print Culture in the Oxford Handbook. Lee is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge, 2005) and Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford, 2012). His most recent book is Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (Princeton, 2019). He has received awards from the Melville Society, Poe Studies Association, and the Association of College and Research Libraries, as well as fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Jennifer Leader: Jennifer Leader is author of The Finite – furnished / With the Infinite –”: Dickinson’s Biblical Imaginations in the Oxford Handbook. Leader is Professor of English at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. She is the author of Knowing, Seeing, Being: Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and the American Typological Tradition (2016). Most recently she has contributed essays on Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Marianne Moore to The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field (2017), Whitman/Dickinson: A Colloquy (2017), and Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore: Essays from a Critical Renaissance (2018).

Renée Bergland: Renee Bergland is author of Dickinson Emergent: Natural Philosophy and the Postdisciplinary Manifold in the Oxford Handbook.  Bergland is Professor of Literature & Writing in the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities at Simmons University. She is the author of The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (University Press of New England, 2000) and Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics (Beacon Press, 2008). With Gary Williams, she edited Philosophies of Sex: New Essays on Julia Ward Howe’s Hermaphrodite (Ohio State University Press, 2012). Since 2014, she has been the book review editor for the Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin.

Kathryn R. Kent: Kathryn R. Kent is author of Dickinson’s Spinster Poetics in the Oxford Handbook. Kent is Professor of English at Williams College. She is the author of Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (2003). Her recent publications reflect her two ongoing projects: an intellectual biography of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and a book queering summer camp in the United States.

Lesley Dill: Lesley Dill is author of “How ruthless are the gentle–”: The Art of Emily Dickinson and Lesley Dill in the Oxford Handbook. Dill is one of the most prominent American artists working at the intersection of language and fine art. Her elegant sculptures, art installations, mixed-media photographs, and evocative performances draw from both her travels abroad and profound interests in spirituality and the world’s faith traditions. Fluid metaphors, appropriated from the poetry and writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, connect the diverse media that Dill employs. Exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche, Dill invests new meaning in the human form. Intellectually and aesthetical engaging, the core of her work emerges from an essential, visionary awareness of the world. 

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

In-Person Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Let your voice be heard at our Festival open mic night! If you have longed to share your poetry in the safe and encouraging environment of Emily Dickinson’s garden, this is your chance. If you’d like to hear a wide variety of poets bravely sharing their work we hope to see you in the audience. Following the open mic, celebrated poet Nathan McClain reads from his new book Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022).

Open mic spots have filled, but there’s still plenty of room to enjoy fresh poetry in the garden!

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About the poets:

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Zocalo Public Square, The Critical Flame, and On The Seawall, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as Poetry Editor for The Massachusetts Review.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Private Workshops

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

In this workshop, we light up the poem-making hour with intention, inspiration, and a vibrant-safe space to make our own creations. High school students are offered a carefully curated sample of Emily Dickinson’s work, and a few clips from the Apple TV show Dickinson. The heart of each class is reserved for student writing, engaging in creating powerful, compact verse. Each student would leave with their own unique letter to the world.

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About the poet:

Samar Abulhassan (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. Born to Lebanese immigrants and raised with multiple languages, she is a 2006 Hedgebrook alum and the author of several chapbooks. Samar is a full time teaching artist and just completed her 14th year of guiding young poets through Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools. Nocturnal by nature, she often gets her best ideas at night, and is inspired by the ocean, music and dance. In 2016, Samar received a CityArtist grant to aid in completing a novel-in-poems reflecting on memory, longing, and the Arabic alphabet.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

In-Person Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Emerging writers of all ages will learn about the process of submitting poetry to literary platforms like The Common, an award-winning literary magazine with a sense of place and a global perspective. Join editorial assistants at The Common and a panel of established poets Jennifer Jean, Karen Skolfield, and Matt Donovan in discussing writing and submission processes from every angle. Writers will leave with concrete advice on inspiration, workflow, and the step-by-step process of literary publishing.

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About the poets:

Jennifer Jean‘s poetry collection VOZ will be released in 2023 from Lily Books. Her other collections include OBJECT LESSON (Lily Books) and THE FOOL (Big Table). She’s also released the teaching resource OBJECT LESSON: A GUIDE TO WRITING POETRY (Lily Books). Her poems, prose, and co-translations have appeared in: Poetry Magazine, Rattle, The Common, On the Seawall, Waxwing, DMQ, Terrain; and, as an Academy of American Poets “Poem-a-Day.” She’s been awarded fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Disquiet/Dzanc Books, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council; as well, she received an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jean is an organizer, and co-translator of Arabic poetry, for the Her Story Is collective. She edits poetry for Talking Writing and translations for Consequence Forum; and, is the program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program.

Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress (W. W. Norton) won the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry and the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry, and she is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she served as poet laureate for Northampton, MA for 2019-2022. www.karenskolfield.com

Matt Donovan is the author most recently of The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022) and the collection of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Facilitators:

Sarah Wu (she/her) is a prospective English and computer science major at Amherst College. She is an editorial assistant intern for The Common, and her short stories have been published in an anthology at The Dark Dispatch and the student literary magazine, The Indicator. She is currently fascinated in how the digital space interacts and enhances the literary experience and how AAPI authors encapsulate and subvert what is labeled as the “Asian American experience.”

Andrenae Jones (she/her) is an English and Film and Media Studies major at Amherst College. She is an editorial assistant intern for The Common, and her stories and essays have been published in Film Matters Journal and The Minetta Review. She is currently working toward a creative thesis written in poetry-prose hybrid that will explore her own personal experiences navigating racial liminality as a young mixed-race woman existing in historically white spaces.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

Hybrid Program

Part of the 2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Tim Hall brings you Trust The Process – a live performance infusion of poetry, storytelling, and music about creative expression, self love, and artistic exploration. Hall’s poetry draws inspiration from his lived experiences – charting the nuances of blackness, masculinity, and the beauties of life.

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About Tim Hall:

Tim Hall is an award winning musician and performance poet from Detroit, MI, now residing in Boston. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Professional Music Department at Berklee College of Music, won Session Musician of the Year by the Boston Music Awards 2020, received a 2019 Artist Luminary Award from local youth arts non-profit Zumix, and was honored by WBUR’s ARTery 25 as 1 of 25 millennials of color impacting Arts and Culture in Boston. Writings of his have been published in: Proud Flesh – Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics, & Consciousness; Mass Poetry – Hard Work of Hope; Vagabond Publishing; and Whisper & Roar Publishing, and currently Hall’s poetry lives in City Hall as he work was selected to be part of Mayor Wu’s Poetry project.

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.

2022 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule