The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival (formerly the Amherst Poetry Festival) is a free event that celebrates the poetic legacy of Emily Dickinson and the contemporary creativity of the Pioneer Valley and beyond.

For more information and the festival schedule, please click here.

EDIS Annual Meeting 2020: “Dickinson at a Distance”

Date: July 31-August 1, 2020

Please click HERE to register for the meeting. Registration is required.

Please click HERE for the “Dickinson at a Distance” Meeting Schedule.

Away from Home are some and I—
An Emigrant to be
In a Metropolis of Homes
Is easy, possibly—

The Habit of a Foreign Sky
We—difficult—acquire
As Children, who remain in Face
The more their Feet retire. (F 807)

How does Dickinson respond generatively and creatively to friends, relatives, and other writers even over distances of time and space? How does she engage with events that happen elsewhere or in other historical periods? What does she think about strangers, immigrants, people living in other places? In what ways did Dickinson and others in her era close geographic and emotional distance, and how might we learn to overcome or interrogate the same issues? At this time of global crisis, we will hold a virtual one-day Annual Meeting that explores how figurations of isolation, distance, and remoteness in Dickinson’s work can teach us ways to connect more deeply with each other on personal, emotional, and intellectual levels. As Marianne Moore, who admired Dickinson greatly, wrote, “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” We plan to explore these themes of seclusion, distance, privacy, and communication at a distance in her work, and we will consider how these themes might provide a new understanding of her poems and letters and allow us to celebrate her achievement together using interactive technology.

We plan a variety of synchronic and asynchronic scholarly panels, cultural events, and poetry sessions using Zoom and YouTube as platforms. Many of these activities, such as the Research Circle and Poetry Discussions, will be familiar to members from our Annual Meetings in years past. Major highlights include:

• International Dickinson (a panel devoted to English translations of scholarship by critics outside of the United States)
• Dickinson and Disaster (a panel formerly proposed at the ALA Conference)
• #trendingDickinsonataDistance (a series of presentations on dissertations and recent publications)
• A Keynote Address by Eliza Richards on “Remote Suffering,” based on her recent book, Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War (U of Pennsylvania P, 2019)
• A Keynote Address by Cristanne Miller, “A New Dickinson's Letters and Prose: A Preview of Exciting Discoveries" (Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell are preparing a new edition of Dickinson's complete [extant] letters, drafts, and fragments, to be submitted to Harvard UP December 2021. This presentation will summarize some of the changes they will be making and their exciting finds, in relation to formatting, dating, state of manuscripts, and letters not included by Johnson.)
• “Away from Home”: New Views on the Homestead and the Evergreens (video interpretations by the Museum docents of household objects, paintings, the gardens, and other features that were imported or represent a world outside Amherst)
• Poetry Circle discussions with scholars and critics, based on suggestions made by members in advance of the conference
• Research Circle
• Live-stream video events, including a musical interlude inspired by Dickinson’s poetry
• Virtual Social Hour and Celebration

Short papers on the theme of distance, isolation, privacy, retirement, seclusion and methods of connection, both emotionally or spatially, are invited. Participants will offer 5-minute presentations on the theme of the conference. Please send a 100-word abstract to Paraic Finnerty (paraic.finnerty@port.ac.uk) and Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau (achevrier.bosseau@gmail.com) by June 30.

A. Dickinson and Disaster

Organizer and Chair: Hsu, Li-hsin, National Chengchi University

1. “Dickinson’s Accidental Falls”, Linda Freedman, University College London.
2. “‘Nerve in Marble’: Eotion, Disaster and Geology in Dickinson”, Amanda Lowe, Columbia Univerisity
3. “‘Dread, but the Whizzing’: Emily Dickinson’s Catastrophic Micro-Histories”, Jamie Fenton, University of Cambridge

B. Dickinson's Dimensions

Chair: TBA

1. “Emily Dickinson and the Politics of Time”, Maria O’Malley, University of Nebraska, Kearney
2. “Jian Feng's Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: A Conceptual Study of Creative Treason”, Muhammad Afzaal (and Liu Kanglong), Shanghai Jiao Tong University
3. “‘As blind men learn the sun’: Emily Dickinson and the queer child”, Bradley Nelson, City University of New York
4. “The Possibility of a Queer Lyric: Reading Difficulty in Dickinson’s Poetics”, Jan Leonard Maramot Rodil, University of California, Irvine

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EDIS MLA panel 2021 – “‘My Splendors are Menagerie’: the Persistence of Emily Dickinson’s Voice in Art Forms Other than Literature”

My Splendors, are Menagerie –
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass –
Whom none but Beetles – know. (F319)


The proleptic last stanza of poem F319 presents Emily Dickinson’s “Splendors” as a “Menagerie” whose unrivaled performance (“their Competeless Show”) will persist long after the poet’s death. Dickinson’s “Splendors” are indeed diverse and persistent, since her life and work have inspired other artists (playwrights, choreographers, screenwriters, composers, visual artists, …) to create new works that both celebrate the uniqueness of Dickinson’s voice and allow these artists to find their own. This panel therefore proposes to examine the many ways in which Emily Dickinson’s works and her unique voice persists, endures, through forms of art other than literature. Possible topics for the panels include:

• Emily Dickinson and the performing arts (dance, theatre, opera, music,…)
• Emily Dickinson and visual arts
• persistence through other forms of art as a “Darwinian” evolutionary strategy, changing, evolving to survive in modern times
• persistence as natural continuance: what in Dickinson’s poetry makes her work naturally suited to adaptations into other art forms?
• persistence as resistance: have artists been inspired by Dickinson’s revolutionary style and eschewing of poetic/social conventions to create their own revolutionary works? Which aspect(s) of resistance in Dickinson’s life and work appeal the most to other artistic creators?
• more broadly, papers could consider Dickinson in relation to other writers of the American Renaissance and in the overarching context of the American Renaissance: how has the pioneer spirit of the American Renaissance translated into other works of art? Are there differences/similarities in the ways these writers have inspired visual/performing artists?

Abstracts (250-300 words) must be sent before March 29, 2020, to Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau (achevrier.bosseau@gmail.com)