April 2025
Tuesday, 4/1/2025
A conversation with Carmen Maria Machado
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. Her Body and Other Parties was listed as a member of “The New Vanguard” by the New York Times in 2018, as one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a 2019 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and a visiting associate professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Spring 2021.
Wednesday, 4/2/2025
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
Poetry, prose, anything goes
7:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You'll have three minutes at the podium to perform. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, you award-winning essay, or your flash fiction to share.
Thursday, 4/3/2025
Brave Testimony: M. Nzadi Keita
presented by the Center for Africana Studies
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
M. Nzadi Keita's third book, Migration Letters: Poems, reflects on her upbringing and coming of age as a Black working-class woman in Philadelphia (originally Lenapehoking). Keita straddles the personal and public, testifying to unsung aspects of Black culture and paying tribute to Black artists throughout: poets like Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, and Al Young, and musicians including Chaka Khan and jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders. In her second book, Brief Evidence of Heaven: Poems from the life of Anna Murray Douglass, Keita used persona to unveil Frederick Douglass’s first wife. She is a Cave Canem alumna, a Pew Fellow, and a Leeway Foundation grantee.
Friday, 4/4/2025
Saturday, 4/5/2025
Sunday, 4/6/2025
Monday, 4/7/2025
Public Media: What You Need To Know
Matt Katz, Kyra McGrath (L’81), and Victor Pickard, with moderators Victoria Feng (C'25) and Conor Smith (C'26)
12:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
supported by: The Povich Journalism Program Fund
Public media is playing an increasingly large role in providing local audiences with the information they need, especially as commercial news outlets face critical challenges. What does a career in public media look like? How can people support public media? Join Annenberg professor Victor Pickard, WHYY EVP Kyra McGrath (L’81), and journalist and Creative Writing Program lecturer Matt Katz for a discussion about the history and future of public media, with student journalists Victoria Feng (C'25) and Conor Smith (C'26) moderating.
Matt Katz is a journalist who worked for more than a decade as a reporter and host at WNYC public radio and NPR, winning a Peabody Award for investigative stories about former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. His 2016 book about Christie, American Governor, was published by Simon & Schuster. In 2024, Matt’s autobiographical podcast, Inconceivable Truth, hit the top 10 on the Apple Podcasts charts. Matt has reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. He is now the executive producer of City Cast Philly, a daily news-and-culture podcast and newsletter, and he’s an adjunct journalism professor in Penn’s Creative Writing Program.
Kyra McGrath (L’81) is the Executive Vice President and President of New Ventures and Enterprises for WHYY, Inc. She previously worked as WHYY’s Chief Operating Officer and Vice President for Strategic Projects and General Counsel. She serves on the board of Public Radio Exchange and was President of the Forum of Executive Women. She has won the Women of Distinction award from The Philadelphia Business Journal and the Take the Lead Award from the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at Penn’s Annenberg School of Communication, where he also co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change Center. His scholarship focuses on the future of journalism and the role of media in a democratic society. He has authored or edited six books, including Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, which was published by Oxford University Press. He has written op-eds for the Columbia Journalism Review and The Atlantic and been interviewed by NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Victoria Feng (C’25) is a student at Penn majoring in Communication. She previously interned at ABC News and NBC News. She has also written for The New York Times, CNBC, and WIRED. She is a 2024 KWH Creative Ventures prize winner. Her Instagram is @victoriafeng.
Conor Smith (C’26) is a student at Penn majoring in Communication and minoring in Law and Society. He is an intern with The Philadelphia Inquirer’s sports department. He previously served as the summer deputy sports editor for The Daily Pennsylvanian. His Instagram is @conorfsmith.
Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and The Critique of Form
Book colloquium and panel discussion
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join scholar, theorist, art historian, and author Rizvana Bradley for a panel discussion and book signing in celebration of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and The Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms — from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry — Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation that begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation.
The evening will start with a reading from Anteaesthetics by Professor Bradley, followed by a panel discussion with artist and critic Aria Dean, University of Pittsburg History of Art & Architecture Professor Huey Copeland, artist Cameron Rowland, and Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English and poet Simone White. Copies of the book will also be available for purchase.The event is co-hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Kelly Writers House, with additional support from the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, the Women’s Center, Department of English, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, the History of Art Department, the Platt Student Performing Arts House and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press 2023), was named a Best Book of the Year by Frieze Magazine and shortlisted for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book. Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of the academic journals October and Camera Obscura. Her scholarly articles appear in Diacritics, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, The Drama Review, and her art criticism appears in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett. Bradley's work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Huey Copeland Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, interrogates African/Diasporic, American and European artistic praxis from the late 18th-century to the present with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. In his interdisciplinary research, Copeland focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. Rather than assume the redemptive power of art, he aims to push history against the grain in exploring the constitutive relationship between the capture of black life and the production of cultural property in the modern transatlantic world. An editor of OCTOBER and a former contributing editor of Artforum, Copeland has published in numerous periodicals as well as in international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. His research interests are further reflected by his course offerings, which range from an introductory survey focused on Euro-American modernisms and their global entanglements to the graduate seminar “Visual Study after Intersectionality.” In addition, Copeland has served as primary advisor for dissertations on topics ranging from early 21st-century Chinese art’s literal and figurative haunting by socialist realist aesthetics to the intersection of the racial and the ecological in 19th-century Francophone Caribbean visual culture. Alongside his work as a teacher, critic, editor, scholar, and administrator, Copeland has co-curated exhibitions such as Interstellar Low Ways (with Anthony Elms), and co-organized international conferences like “Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics” (with Sampada Aranke).
Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally; recent exhibitions include Facts Worth Knowing at Chateau Shatto (Los Angeles), Aria Dean: Abattoir at ICA London (2024), Figuer Sucia at Greene Naftali, New York (2023), Abattoir, U.S.A! At the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2023); Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Biennial 2022 at The Whitney Museum, New York (2022). Bad Infinity, her first book of collected writing, is out via Sternberg Press.
Cameron Rowland lives and works in New York. Their work is grounded in the black antagonism of property. Rowland’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Dia Art Foundation, Beacon; Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Germany; Établissement d'en face, Brussels; Artists Space, New York and Essex Street / Maxwell Graham, New York.
Simone White is Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the Kelly Writers House. White is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century Black studies and radical Black poetics, as well as a critically-acclaimed poet. She received the prestigious Whiting Award in 2017 and recently received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. She has published three books: Dear Angel of Death, a collection of poems and critical essays; Of Being Dispersed (poems), and House Envy of All the World (poems), as well as two poetry chapbooks. Another poetry collection, Or, On Being the Other Woman will be published by Duke University Press in 2021. In addition, White has published numerous critical essays and poems in popular periodicals such as Artforum, Boston Review and Harper's Magazine. Prior to receiving her doctorate in English from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, White earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.F.A. from The New School.
Che Gossett is associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to returning to Penn — where they received an M.A. in History — they were the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2021-23, and a Animal Law and Policy fellow at Harvard Law School from 2022-2024. Gossett has published work in anthologies such as Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2018), and is co-editor, with Yale University African American Studies professor Tavia Nyong’o, of a forthcoming Social Text journal special issue on Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics. They are the recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant for their forthcoming book on Marlon Riggs, queer cinema and the Black radical tradition.
Rachell Morillo is ICA’s DAJ Director of Public Engagement and Research. In this role, she is responsible for spearheading the development of innovative, community-led programs and projects that foster critical dialogue, promote quality of life, and cultivate civic engagement in Philadelphia. Morillo brings a wealth of experience in arts education and community engagement, having previously served as Associate Educator of Civic Engagement at the Museum of Modern Art and Senior Coordinator of Public Programs & Community Engagement at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Tuesday, 4/8/2025
Ekaterina Derysheva and Aiden Farrell: Translation and Dialogue
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Kevin Platt
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Ekaterina Derysheva is a displaced poet from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Since January 2024, Derysheva has been living in Philadelphia, where she is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow, poet-in-residence, and at-risk scholar, hosted by the Department of Russian and East European Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Derysheva is concurrently the 2024-2025 Writer-in-Residence at Public Trust. Derysheva’s poems have been published in journals such as Circulo de Poesia, Plume, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Wizie, Volga, and others. She is the author of the books Точка отсчета (Starting Point, 2018) and инсталляции не будет (There Will Be No Installation, 2023), and the co-author of the book Insulua Timpului (Earth Time, 2020). Her work is also featured in the anthology In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Carolyn Forché (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).
Aiden Farrell is a French-American poet, translator, and editor based in Brooklyn, NY, whose writing observes the boundaries between environment, experience, and thought, where language exists as a sense and threshold. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes will be published by World Poetry in Spring 2025. Aiden is the author of numerous chapbooks, most recently lilac lilac published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. His writing and translation have been featured in Asymptote, Denver Quarterly, Ethics, Mercury Firs, and elsewhere.
Wednesday, 4/9/2025
Poet Sawako Nakayasu
Creative Writing Program
6:30 PM in person
co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program and The Temple Program in Creative Writing
hosted by: Julia Bloch
EVENT CANCELLED
Photo by Becca Ranta
Born in Japan and raised in the US, Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation. Her newest books of poetry include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, and Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020), both of which engage the intersection between writing and translation. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence, Rhode Island on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects.
Thursday, 4/10/2025
An evening with musician Lenny Kaye
Blutt Songwriter Symposium
5:00 PM reception | 6:00 PM interview
hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
As musician, writer, and record producer, Lenny Kaye has been intimately involved with the creative impulse that marks the music. He is a founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band, dating from their first performance as a duo at St. Marks Church in New York’s East Village on February 10, 1971, and has worked with such artists as Suzanne Vega, Jim Carroll, Allen Ginsberg, Soul Asylum, and Jessi Colter. His books include You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon (2004); Waylon: An Autobiography (1994); and the newly released Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll. His seminal anthology of garage rock, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts of the First Psychedelic Era, is regarded as defining a genre and recently celebrated its golden anniversary. Visit Instagram@lenny_kaye.
Friday, 4/11/2025
Saturday, 4/12/2025
Sunday, 4/13/2025
Monday, 4/14/2025
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (also known as "the Hub") — the core group of engaged students, staff, faculty, and volunteers who help make things happen at Writers House. Anyone is welcome to become a Hub member by participating in Hub activities and helping out. Members of the Hub plan programs, share ideas, and discuss upcoming projects.
Tuesday, 4/15/2025
Kathleen DeMarco Van Cleve & KATE MYERS
A conversation about writing, mentoring, and teaching
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Alli Katz
supported by: the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Kathleen DeMarco Van Cleve is a novelist, screenwriter, film producer and teacher. Her most recent work is Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge, the 2020 Children’s History Book Prize winner, which was co-written with Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Never Caught was also named to Reader’s Digest’s List of the 106 Best Children’s Books of All Time. Her most recent screenplay, Femesis, was co-written with Aline Brosh McKenna, the writer of The Devil Wears Prada and My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Her middle gradenovel Drizzle won the Keystone State Reading Award and received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, The Bulletin for the Center of Children’s Books and School Library Journal. Her debut novel, Cranberry Queen, was published in over twelve countries and was optioned by Miramax Films. For over a decade, she worked with actor/producer/playwright John Leguizamo and with him produced several movies, including the Sundance Film Festival screenwriting winner, Joe the King, and the award-winning film, Pinero. DeMarco Van Cleve graduated from Penn with a dual degree from the College of Arts & Sciences (Creative Writing) and Wharton.
Kate Myers is the author of the national bestseller Excavations. Her writing has appeared in Elle, and Self magazines, as well as on BuzzFeed. She studied archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and has lived in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, where she's worked for CBS and for CollegeHumor. Her debut novel, Excavations, is being turned into a Peacock series starring Amy Poehler. She now resides in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband, daughters, and dog.
Adrienne Brodeur: reading and conversation
Lucid Fiction Program
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Piyali Bhattacharya
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film, and the novel Little Monsters, a New York Times editors choice and a Vogue best book of 2023. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children.
Wednesday, 4/16/2025
Thursday, 4/17/2025
Annual KWH Marathon Reading
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
10:00 AM - 10:00 PM in person
to read: sign up for a ten-minute reading slot
For our first annual Bernheimer Symposium, Program Coordinator Erin Gautsche invented for us what has become an annual tradition. Each year, the Writers House Hub selects a book to read aloud, straight through, and we celebrate the book with extravagant decorations, a menu derived from the text, and a commemorative t-shirt (typically designed by the incomparable Alli Katz). This year, in honor of the Jane Austen's 250th birthday, the Hub selected Pride and Prejudice. Everyone is welcome to come for the day- all or in part!
Friday, 4/18/2025
Saturday, 4/19/2025
Sunday, 4/20/2025
Monday, 4/21/2025
Tuesday, 4/22/2025
Emma Copley Eisenberg: reading and conversation
But Company Reading Series
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Michelle Taransky
co-sponsored by: the LGBT Center
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Credit: Kenzi Crash
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the novel Housemates, which was a national bestseller and named best book of the year by The Boston Globe, People, NBC, Them.Us, Autostraddle, and Kirkus Reviews as well as one of Electric Literature’s “Top 5 Novels of 2024” and Time Magazine’s “16 Best Books to Read for Pride.” Her narrative nonfiction book, The Third Rainbow Girl, was a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice as and a finalist for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Granta, Esquire, The New Republic, The Washington Post Magazine, VQR, and many other publications. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her short story collection, Fat Swim, is forthcoming from Hogarth in 2026.
Wednesday, 4/23/2025
Andrea Lawlor: reading and conversation
6:30 PM in person
hosted by: Abbey Mei Otis
co-sponsored by: the Wolf Humanities Center, the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program, and the Fund for Feminist Projects at the KWH
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Photo credit: Joanna Chattman
Andrea Lawlor is the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Rescue Press, 2017; Vintage, 2019; Picador UK, 2019). Their stories, essays, and poems have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, and The New York Times. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, as well as fellowships from Lambda Literary, Radar Labs, the Ucross Foundation, and Macdowell Colony. They are an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Mount Holyoke College, and live in Western Massachusetts.
Thursday, 4/24/2025
America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling
A Conversation with Jonathan D. Cohen
Weber Symposium
5:00 PM: reception
6:00 PM: interview/conversation
hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Jonathan D. Cohen is senior program officer at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of Losing Big: America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling (2025) and For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America (2022) as well as the co-editor of essay collections about gambling and the work of Bruce Springsteen. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other outlets.
Friday, 4/25/2025
Saturday, 4/26/2025
Sunday, 4/27/2025
Monday, 4/28/2025
A reading by Alice Notley
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Alice Notley is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), How Spring Comes (1981), which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda (1981), Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993), The Descent of Alette (1996), among many others. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Certain Magical Acts (2016). Notley has received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2015, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She earned a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in Paris, France.
Tuesday, 4/29/2025
A conversation with Alice Notley
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Alice Notley is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), How Spring Comes (1981), which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda (1981), Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993), The Descent of Alette (1996), among many others. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s recent work includes Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Certain Magical Acts (2016). Notley has received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2015, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She earned a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in Paris, France.
Zine Fest
Co-organized by students in Kayla Romberger's Pixel to Print course
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Zine makers and DIY-print enthusiasts are welcome to join us in for our annual Zine Fest, co-organized by students in Kayla Romberger's Pixel to Print course. We'll have table space available for anyone who wants to bring their zines for sale or trade — plus snack foods! Follow the registration link to request table space or simply to say you plan to attend.
Wednesday, 4/30/2025
Creative Writing Honors Thesis Reading
5:30 PM in person
sponsered by: the Creative Writing Program
rsvp: register here to attend in person
A number of our graduating seniors have been working hard to complete their Creative Writing thesis projects - long-form creative literary works in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, and mixed genres that serve as the capstones to their time at Penn as writers. Join us for a celebration of their collective achievements. Several seniors will read from their projects.