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 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a subject that haunts you. We will be looking at how to write and sustain work within a singular focus, obsession, or motif. This workshop introduces poems and works paired with exercises that allow the writer to be haunted by a subject, inviting writers to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that find themselves, suddenly facing the ghosts that visit them frequently. Ultimately, we will look to lines from Dickinson that declare:

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors Surpassing
Material Place—

About the Poet
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, published by Liveright Press in 2023, is long listed for the National Book Award and is the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves on the board for Poetry Daily and on the board for the Worcester County Poetry Association.
oliverdelapaz.com

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

Like us, Emily Dickinson lived in a time of ecological change and painful civil conflict. Against this backdrop, Dickinson’s poems reach out to the world around her—the frog, the snake, the hummingbird, train, “slant of light,” even the “loaded gun,” addressing these others as companions, fellow witnesses. In this panel, poets Carolina Ebeid, Julia Guez, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Tess Taylor will explore both Dickinson’s and their own dialogues with the nonhuman. The poets will read poems by Dickinson in conversation with each other’s work to plumb that site in which “surpassing/Material Place—” we might instead “Dwell in Possibility.” We follow with writing prompts and conversation.

About the Poets
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet born in New Jersey to Palestinian and Cuban parents. She is the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, the chapbook Dauerwunder, and many digital experiments. She edits poetry at The Rumpus and Visible Binary, and from 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University.
carolinaebeid.com

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

Emily Dickinson’s poems interact with silence to open spaces of questioning, recognition, and keen attention to spiritual matters and questions of meaning. In this workshop, we’ll place our own poetry in the context of Dickinson’s poetry, offer a short guided meditation and generative prompts for participants to explore their own relation to silence, voice, and spiritual attention.

About the Poets

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. We hope you’ll register for other Festival programs!

In this workshop, participants will learn how to translate their personal stories of illness and disability into poetry, something Dickinson herself practiced, and something that’s employed by practitioners of Narrative/Poetic Medicine.

The workshop, led by poets whose work centers around medicine and disability (from the perspectives of physician, caregiver, and as patients themselves) will be both reflective and generative and will include the reading and discussion of a medical poem by Dickinson as well as a poem by a contemporary “medical poet.” The workshop will culminate with a generative exercise involving the translation of participants’ medical histories into poetic form.

About the Poets

Catharine Clark-Sayles is a physician who recently retired after forty years in practice. She completed her MFA in poetry and narrative medicine at Dominican University of California in 2019. Her first two books of poetry, One Breath and Lifeboat, were published by Tebot Bach Press. A chapbook, Brats, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her fourth book, The Telling, The Listening, was published by Saint Julian Press in October 2023.
clarksayles.com

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of rinky dink press, and the founding director of Revisionary Arts, a nonprofit that facilitates self-care and healing through poetry. She’s published three collections of poetry and was the winner of the 2017 Split Rock Review chapboo competition. Her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, poets.org, on local NPR affiliates, national NPR podcasts, the TEDx stage, and elsewhere. She teaches at ASU.
rdpoet.com

VIRTUAL PROGRAM — streaming live for online registrants

This program is FREE to attend. Registration is required. 
Part of the 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival!

Join us for the 12th 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:

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

SOLD OUT! — This program has reached maximum registrant capacity. Thank you for your interest!

Facilitators will lead participants in a series of generative writing exercises using personal family and ancestral history as creative inspiration and content. The workshop will allow time for writing and limited time for sharing excerpts in breakout rooms. Participants will leave the workshop with at least two writing sketches and other writing resources to continue developing their ideas and creatively archiving their own family histories.

About the Poets
Tamara J. Madison is a writer, poet, editor, and instructor currently living, working, and writing in Central
Florida. She is a MFA graduate of New England College with a focus in poetry. She is also the inaugural senior\ fellow of Anaphora Literary Arts. Her work has been reviewed and published in various journals and literary magazines including Poetry International, Cider Press Review, and World Literature Today. Her most recent full-length poetry collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus, was published by Trio House Press (2019).
www.tamarajmadison.com

VIRTUAL  and HYBRID Program (see date details below)

Part of the FREE 2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

Come read with us and join in 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. 

Join us for the 12th annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum! 

REGISTER FOR THE FESTIVAL

There are two ways to participate in each Marathon session: as a reader or as a listener.

• Listeners sit back and enjoy the group reading, which beautifully blends the voices of volunteer readers coming to Dickinson from different places, times in their lives, and levels of familiarity with the Poet. Listeners can watch the Marathon online via Zoom all week long. Listeners can watch the Marathon online OR in-person during the hybrid sessions on Saturday and Sunday. To sign up as a listener, register through the main Festival page.
• Readers volunteer to read 10-20 poems as part of the circle reading. Reader spots are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Readers of all levels of experience are invited to participate! To sign up as a reader, complete the separate Reader Registration below.

READER SIGN UP

Schedule:
Monday, September 23:
6pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 1

Thursday, September 26:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 4, co-hosted by the Jones Library

Friday, September 27:
12pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 5, co-hosted by the Emily Dickinson International Society

Saturday, September 28:
9:30am [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 6

Gingerbread cookies will be served!

Sunday, September 29:
2pm [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Grand Finale

With coconut cake to celebrate!

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.

2024 Tell It Slant Poetry Festival Schedule

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. View the full educator workshop lineup.
Please select the ticket price that is right for you, and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

REGISTER

It feels a shame to be Alive –
When Men so brave – are dead –
One envies the Distinguished Dust –
Permitted – such a Head –
(fragment Fr524)

Although myths about Emily Dickinson portray her removed from the issues of her day, current scholarship proves that Dickinson was profoundly concerned with and affected by the issues that caused the American Civil War and wrote many poems about them, such as this one, which implicates the speaker directly in a kind of survivor’s guilt. In fact, in the summer of 2020 as we began to write poems about the Black Lives Matter movements, we looked to Dickinson’s extensive Civil War poems for inspiration about this earlier social movement to liberate Black lives. The result is our co-written collection of poems, Within Flesh: In Conversation with Our Selves and Emily Dickinson, published in 2024. Written by a Muslim man of Iranian descent and a Jewish woman from Brooklyn, it offers a unique three-way conversation over space and time about the history of social injustices and how we begin to repair ourselves and the broken world.

We will frame this seminar with readings from Within Flesh to illustrate how Dickinson’s poems facilitated our creative work on contemporary issues and can provide the impetus for your students to think deeply about the world around them. Our goal is to provide you with materials for a unit or assignment on Dickinson and the War as a mirror for exploring social movements of our own time. As a resource, we will use two posts from Ivy’s year-long and freely-accessible blog, “White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862”, which explores the Battle of Antietam and the use of photography (the new social medium of the day, which radically changed the reach and effect of the war.) We will discuss how to contextualize Dickinson’s war poetry, the poetic strategies she used to represent the war, and her recurring themes and images. We will end with a few of our poetic “conversations” as examples.

Born in Southern California, Al Salehi is a multilingual American poet and entrepreneur of Persian descent who lives in Orange County with a background in technology. Al graduated from UCLA and went on to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Al is a graduate from Dartmouth College’s Guarini Graduate School where he studied Creative Writing, and currently serves on the Alumni Council. He also completed a creative writing program at the University of Oxford, Exeter College. Al’s short film Love, Basketball won second place in the My Hero International Film Festival, 2021, under the “Poetry” category. He has published and/or presented poetry in the Society of Classical Poets, The Dartmouth Writers Society, The United Nations Association, Southwest Airlines, O.C. Registrar, Dartmouth Leslie Center Lifeline’s Poetry Share, Houston Library Poetry Share, Clamantis Journal, and the Dartmouth Medical School Lifeline’s Journal. Al’s collection, Enter Atlas, was a Semi-Finalist for the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, judged by Natasha Trethewey.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised in a Jewish-American family, Ivy Schweitzer has lived in Vermont for many years and taught courses in American Literature and Women and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She has recently published poetry in Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Antiphon volume 19, Clear Poetry, Passager, Ritualwell, Tikkun, New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. In 2018, she felt called by Emily Dickinson to spend a year immersed in that poet’s most creative period in which she wrote almost a poem a day; the result is a year-long weekly blog called White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat. In February 2024, she and Al Salehi published their co-written book of poetry titled “Within Flesh: In Conversation with Ourselves and Emily Dickinson.” Her solo collection, titled Tumult, Whitewash and Stretch Marks, will appear from Finishing Line Press in 2025.
sites.dartmouth.edu/ivyschweitzer

Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20.
Please select the ticket price that is right for you, and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

Professional Development certificates are available upon request — please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum if you are interested.

REGISTER

Through the Dark Sod – as Education –
The Lily passes sure –
Feels her white foot – no trepidation –
Her faith – no fear –
Afterward – in the Meadow –
Swinging her Beryl Bell –
The Mold-life – all forgotten – now –
In Extasy – and Dell – (Fr559)

If poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley asserted (The Defence of Poetry), they are also the most underrepresented writers in the literature curriculum in many schools. Poetry is intimidating to many students—and to many teachers, too—because, unlike the Lily, we don’t always “pass sure” through the “Dark Sod” of convoluted diction, unfamiliar allusions, and concentrated ideas that characterize many poems.Like our students, we crave certainty and control.

The poems of Emily Dickinson can be especially challenging for students and teachers because, despite their simplicity of form, they deny straightforward readings or unified interpretations. But if we can learn to read with “no trepidation,” delving into Dickinson’s complexities can be a true delight, an opportunity for students and teachers alike to “swing their Beryl Bells” in “Extasy.”

In this workshop, we will read several poems together, developing our tolerance for ambiguity and sharing methods that help students overcome their fears of “getting it wrong” when they discuss Dickinson’s work. Using simple protocols, we will explore strategies for decoding the paraphrasable content of the poems, interpreting their evocative language, and making personal connections through low-stakes writing and discussion. We will also consider various approaches to choosing Dickinson poems for study and developing curriculum units.

Bruce M. Penniman, Ed.D., taught writing, speech, and literature at Amherst Regional High School for 36 years and is still an advisor to the Sene-Gambian Scholars exchange program there. He served as Site Director of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught numerous graduate courses for teachers. In 1999 he was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and finalist for National Teacher of the Year, and he is the author of Building the English Classroom: Foundations, Support, Success (NCTE, 2009). He has been a teacher curriculum mentor in all four NEH Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place workshops and has facilitated discussions for the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group on topics ranging from “Emily Dickinson and the Bible” to “Emily Dickinson and Science.”

Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org