Poet Terrance Hayes wows English classes at Emily Dickinson Museum

On the sunny morning of Friday, September 19, 2025, a group of Amherst students and teachers walked to the Emily Dickinson Museum to attend a poetry workshop given by poet Terrance Hayes as part of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, held from September 15-21.

For many years, the Emily Dickinson museum has coordinated poets coming to ARHS to give workshops to 10th-grade classes as a part of their annual poetry festival. “All ARHS students read, study, and write poetry in a big poetry unit in tenth grade, so it makes sense to center the visitor there,” English Department Head Sara Barber-Just told The Graphic in 2019. But this year, the museum chose to invite multiple schools to attend the workshop at the museum. 

Elias Bradley, the Education Programs Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum, reached out to the ARHS English department in the spring of last school year about the Hayes workshop. “The first week of school, I reached back out, and I said, ‘We’re still interested,’” said English teacher Mattew Despres, who was the main organizer of the field trip. “From there, it was just a matter of figuring out how to get permission to take people.”

While the English teachers and students attending the workshop thought Hayes would be reading his own poems, the poet decided to play recordings of poems from Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Donika Kelly, as well as providing a packet of the poems for people to read along. 

While listening to each poem, Hayes would tell the group to pull out “what you think is hot,” said Despres. “It wasn’t an academic analysis of a poem,” but instead invited students to share what they noticed about each poet’s language.  

After listening, the group would write their own poem using the main theme of the poems he had chosen to read aloud. At the very end of the workshop, students were invited to share their poems, and many did.

“He was super welcoming of new poets and talking about how a big thing that you can do to get better is to write every day,” said junior Liana Page, who went with her Contemporary Literature class, taught by English teacher Kate Kuhn.

“My favorite part [was] listening to the poems that [students from other schools] wrote at the workshop, or getting to read my classmates’ [poems] and also just getting to read the poems that he provided,” said junior Luella Miller, another student in Kuhn’s class.