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Thursday, 10/1
- 4:30 PM: Screening of Fried Green Tomatoes, in preparation for Jon Avnet's visit on Friday.
- 6:00 PM: A BERNADETTE MAYER
CELEBRATION: A tribute and reading with poets Ange
Mlinko, Shawn Walker, Lee Ann Brown and Bernadette Mayer. Photos
from the evening.
Shawn Walker, a founder and friend of the Writers House, will offer a tribute reading drawing from several of Mayer's books.
Lee Ann Brown's book Polyverse won the New American Poetry Prize and is coming out from Sun & Moon Press in November of 1998. It is dedicated to Bernadette Mayer who Lee Ann counts as one of her primary teachers, collaborators and inspirers. This October she is presenting films and poems at a conference on American Cinema & Poetry at the centre international de poésie Marseille. She is the editor of the independent poetry press, Tender Buttons, whose first publication was Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets in 1989. Her poetry has been published in Fence, Combo, and The Voluptuary Lion Poems of Spring. She teaches poetry and writing in places as various as Bard College and Bushwick Outreach, Columbia Univeristy and City-As-School, NYC.
Born in Philadelphia, Ange Mlinko just moved to Brooklyn via Boston and Providence. A full-length collection of poetry called Matinees is forthcoming from Zoland Books in April 1999. She's published work in Grand Street, Agni, New American Writing, and The World; work is forthcoming in Lingo, Shiny, and Combo. In 1995, Mlinko published a chapter from Bernadette's underground manuscript, The Ethics of Sleep, in her magazine Compound Eye (now defunct). She has written about Mayer's work for the Boston magazine Artsmedia, and is currently reviewing Mayer's Two Haloed Mourners, forthcoming from Granary Books, for the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter.
Bernadette Mayer was born May 12, 1945 in Brooklyn. From 1967 to 1969 she was the co-editor of 0 to 9 (with Vito Acconci), from 1972 to 1974 co-editor of Unnatural Acts (with Ed Friedman) and from 1977 to 1983 of United Artists (with Lewis Warsh). Her poetry workshops, especially at The Poetry Project in Manhattan, have inspired whole generations of new poets. She was the director of The Poetry Project from 1980 to 1984. Her books include: Story (1968), Moving (1971), Memory (1977), Ceremony Latin 1964 (1975), Studying Hunger (1976), Poetry (1976), Eruditio Ex Memoria (1977), The Golden Book of Words (1978), Midwinter Day (1982), Utopia (1983), Mutual Aid (1985), Sonnets (1989), The Formal Field of Kissing (1990), A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), Proper Name (1996), Another Smashed Pinecone (1998), Two Haloed Mourners (1998).
Bernadette Mayer's reading was recorded and is available through PENNsound.
Friday, 10/2
Family Weekend
- 12:00-2:00 PM: Producer and Director Jon Avnet visits the Writers
House!
Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Jon Avnet attended Penn in the late 1960's. Since then, he has gone on to become a successful feature film producer and director. Included in his directing credits are such successes as "Red Corner" (1997) with Richard Gere, "Up Close and Personal" (1996), featuring Michele Pfeifer and Robert Redford, and the critically acclaimed film "Fried Green Tomatoes" (1991), starring Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy. Over the past twenty years, Avnet has also produced a number of hit movies including "Risky Business" (1983), "Tango and Cash" (1989), "The Mighty Ducks" (1992), "The Three Musketeers" (1993), as well as the recent blockbuster "George of the Jungle" (1997).
Saturday, 10/3
Family Weekend
- 11:00-2:00 PM Open House for Penn students and their families
4:00-7:00 PM Reception for Parents of the Class of 1999
Sunday, 10/4
Monday, 10/5
- 5:30 PM Walter Keady revisits the Penn and Pencil Club to read from his new novel Mary McGreevy, followed by dinner and conversation. R.S.V.P. required.
Tuesday, 10/6
- At 5:00 PM the Writers House will close for the evening.
Wednesday, 10/7
- 11:00-3:00 PM Academic Fair on Locust Walk. Meet, among many others, representatives from Writers House, the Writing Advisors, the English Writing Program, and Writing Across the University.
-
4:30 PM
Roy
Gainsburg, Former President of St.
Martin's Press, speaks on
"The Role of the Editor in Book Publishing: Fiction and
Nonfiction."
Discussion followed by informal supper and conversation. RSVP to 746-POEM.Roy Gainsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received an A.B. degree from Brown University in 1954 and an LL.B. degree from Harvard Law School in 1957. He practiced law for many years, representing, in the publishing and literary areas, St. Martin's Press, Macmillan Publishers Limited (London), and J.R.R. Tolkien (and his estate after his death). He was also the American attorney for Oxford University and several of its Colleges. He became President and Chief Operating Officer of St. Martin's Press in 1987. At St. Martin's, in addition to his general administrative duties, he had direct responsibility over three of the company's five publishing divisions. He also was involved in the acquisition of trade titles by the company and did editorial work. He retired as President in 1997 but continues to work at St. Martin's in a part-time capacity.
Thursday, 10/8
- 8:00-10:00 PM: Virgin House Band!
Friday, 10/9
Saturday, 10/10
- 1:00-2:00 PM Laughing Hermit reading series, hosted by Robin Hiteshew, presents Susan
Wood.
Susan Wood was born in Northeast Texas and is Associate Professor of English, Rice University, Houston. She is the author of two books of poetry, Bazaar (1981), and Campo Santo (1991). Campo Santo won the 1991 Lamont Poetry prize. Her work has appeared in many journals. In 1998 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and she was also named as one of the Senior Writers at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
- 2:00-4:00 PM Saturday Reading Project
- 4:00-6:00 PM Q'zine and the Kelly Writers House host a Open Mic Reading in Honor of National Coming Out Day
Sunday, 10/11
- 5:45 PM: Writing Advising Dinner
Monday, 10/12
- 5:00 PM Poet Martin Espada comes to the House, for a reading
followed by dinner and informal conversation. First in the Greenfield
Intercultural Center Public Lecture Series. Sponsored by GIC and Writers
House. R.S.V.P. required for dinner.
Listen to a recording of this event.
Called "the Latino poet of his generation," Martin Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. His fifth book of poetry, Imagine the Angels of Bread (W.W. Norton), won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Another volume of poems, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone Press), won both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Fellowship. The PEN/Revson judges were unanimous: "This is political poetry at its best...The greatness of Espada's art, like all great arts, is that it gives dignity to the insulted and injured of the earth." Espada's poems have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, Pushcart Prize XXIII and The Best American Poetry. His first book of essays, called Zapata's Disciple, has recently been published by South End Press. Much of his writing arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. He is also the editor of Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press, and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Espada is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Tuesday, 10/13
- 8:00 PM Taping of LIVE at the Writers House. This show features Carrie Scanga, Josephine Foo, Bill Greene and Hot Mango Chutney, Alicia Askenase, Michael Taylor/Jon Madof Group, Andrew Zitcer, Jerry Rudasill, and Kirsten Thorpe.
Wednesday, 10/14
- 4:30 PM: Planning Committee Meeting!
- 8:00-10:00 PM: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes, an open mic performance night.
Thursday, 10/15
- 4:30 pm: Talking Film presents: Owen Levin from the Shooting Gallery. Owen Levin is the Director of Aquisitions and Assistant to the President at TSG Pictures, a division of The Shooting Gallery. He has worked on releases of films such as illtown, Niagara Niagara, I Went Down, and Dee Snider's Strangeland. Levin will lead a conversation about distributing independent films.
- 8:00-10:00 PM: Virgin House Band!
Friday, 10/16
- 5:00 PM Reading by Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, is one of the best known contemporary American poets. Helen Vendler has written that "Graham's fierce sense of the philosophic universal may help remind American poets that there is a dimension of the lyric that goes beyond the merely personal . . . . It is the dimension we find in Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson--austere, renunciatory, far-seeing, but also detailed, intimate, saturated with phenomena." Graham's books include Dream of the Unified Field, Materialism, and Region of Unlikeness,; and she has edited an anthology, Earth Took of Earth. She teaches at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.
This program was recorded and is available in mp3 format on Jorie Graham's PennSound page.
Saturday, 10/17
Fall Break
- 2:00-4:00 PM Saturday Reading Project
Sunday, 10/18
Fall Break
- 10:30 PM LIVE at the Writers House airs on WXPN, 88.5 FM
Monday, 10/19
Fall Break
Tuesday, 10/20
- 3:00 PM: Poetry Discussion Group
- 4:30 PM: Jeffrey Kluger reads and discusses science and book
writing.
Jeffrey Kluger is a senior writer at Time magazine, covering science in general and the space program in particular. He is the coauthor, along with astronaut Jim Lovell, of Lost Moon, the book that served as the basis of the 1995 movie, Apollo 13. He is the sole author of a second book-The Apollo Adventure-that accompanied the release of the movie, and he is currently writing a new book for Simon & Schuster about the unmanned space program and the exploration of the solar system. Before coming to Time, Kluger worked for Discover magazine, where he wrote the Light Elements humor column. Prior to that, he was health editor at Family Circle magazine, story editor at The New York Times Business World Magazine, and Associate Editor at Science Digest magazine. His features and columns have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Gentlemen's Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Omni, McCall's, New York Magazine, The New York Post, Newsday, and, of course, Time. He is an adjunct instructor in the graduate journalism program at New York University and a licensed-though non-practicing-attorney.
Wednesday, 10/21
- CANCELLED: 4:30 PM Talking Film presents: Nancy Sackett.
Sackett has been a Hollywood writer for almost 20 years, and has authored
countless feature films, mini series, pilots, specials, and television
movies, including _Bridge to Terrabithia_, _Almost Perfect_, and _The
Candy Mossler Story_. She has taught screenwriting at UCLA and currently
teaches at the American Film Institute in California. Please join us.
- 7:00 PM African-American Studies and the Kelly Writers House present: Kristen Hunter-Lattany. Lattany was the recipient recipient of the Moonstone Black Writing Celebration Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the author of eight published novels, most recently the novel Kinfolks from One World/Ballantine Books. Lattany has been a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier, an advertising copywriter, an information officer for the City of Philadelphia, and, until her retirement in 1995, an instructor in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Please join us for her reading on Wednesday evening!
Thursday, 10/22
- Poet Tony Lopez comes to the House, for an afternoon talk and
dinner. Collaboration between the Writers House and Temple University's
Creative Writing program.
- 3:30-5:00 p.m. Informal talk
- 5:30-7:00 p.m. Dinner (RSVP only)
- 8:00 p.m. Reading at Temple University Gallery, 45 North Second Street. For more information or for directions, call Temple University's Creative Writing department at (215) 204-1796.
Tony Lopez was born in 1950 and grew up in Brixton, South London. He began working as a freelance writer on short stories for newspapers and magazines in the early 1970s and published five crime and science fiction novels with New English Library between 1973 & 1976, when he gave up writing fiction and went back to school. He attended the University of Essex (BA 1980) and Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge (PhD 1986). During the 1980s he was involved in various performance art events which were staged in Britain and Europe. He has published many books and pamphlets of poetry including Snapshots (1976), Change (1977), The English Disease (1979), A Handbook of British Birds (1982), Abstract and Delicious (1983), A Theory of Surplus Labour (1990), Stress Management (1994) and most recently Negative Equity and Other Poems (1995). A selection of his poetry is included in the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos (1996), edited by Iain Sinclair. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth.
- 6:00 PM The Artists Guild holds a screening of the film Pillow Book in room 202
Friday, 10/23
- 12:00 PM Writer Titi Ufomata speaks on "Challenging
Stereotypes: Voices from the Marketplace," and reads from her short story
collection Voices From the Marketplace.
Titi Ufomata is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Benin in Benin-City, Nigeria, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Speech Communication at Kentucky State University. She has a B.A. and M.A. (English) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a M.A. and Ph.D. (Phonetics) from the University of London. Dr. Ufomata was a Commonwealth Academic Staff Scholar, a British Academy Visiting Fellow, a Laureate of the CODESRIA Gender Institute (Dakar, Senegal), a fellow of the American International Visitors Program and an Associate of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She had a short stint with the prestigious Guardian Newspapers in Lagos, and still contributes an op-ed from time to time. She has published extensively and recently completed a collection of short stories on market women in Nigeria.
Saturday, 10/24
- 2:00-4:00 PM Saturday Reading Project
- 8:00-10:00 Full Circle, an Open Mic for Philadelphia-area poets, hosted by Cecily Kellogg and Charlie O'Hay. Featuring Ethel Rackin and Joanne Leva. Ethel is the associate editor of American Poetry Review and was the editor of APR's Philly Edition. Joanne is the founder and host of Poetry For Us, and is leading the organization creating a Montgomery County Poet Laureate. Both have work that veers from concrete to surreal, from narrative to modernistic. An open reading will follow.
Sunday, 10/25
Monday, 10/26
- 12:00-2:00 PM: Talking Film presents Sharon Pinkenson
Pinkenson is the Executive Director of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, appointed by Mayor Ed Rendell. Through this office Pinkenson markets the City of Philadelphia and the surrounding region to the film, video, and television industry. She is also the liaison between city service departments and the visiting production company. During her tenure at the Film Office Pinkenson has worked on such films as Philadelphia, 12 Monkeys, Up Close & Personal, Fallen, and Beloved. Previously, Pinkenson worked eight years as a costume designer and wardrobe stylist in the film industry.
Tuesday, 10/27
- 1:15-3:00 PM Reception for the University of Pennsylvania
Women's Club
- 3:30 PM: Discussion of Wah/Stevans work in advance of Philly Talks
- 7:00-9:00 PM: Talking Film presents a screening of The
Fallen, an original vampire film written and directed by Penn junior
Jordan Rockwell.
Not able to keep his ambitions inside any longer, Jordan E. Rockwell enrolled in a filmmaking class during his sophomore year of high school and has been hooked ever since, showing three of his short films to the entire student body of St. Paul's School in Baltimore, Maryland, his hometown. The Fallen is his first foray into film at Penn. His next film September Song, which is currently in production, explores the complexities of inter-religious relationships. Rockwell counts Ridley Scott, David Fincher, and Michael Bay as his biggest influences, and hopes to pursue a career in the movie business upon graduation from Penn.
Wednesday, 10/28
- 8:00-10:00 PM Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes, an open mic performance night.
Thursday, 10/29
- 7:00 PM Poet Alice Notley reads.
Alice Notley was born in 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona. She received a B.A from Barnard College, in 1967, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1969. She married the writer Ted Berrigan in 1972, with whom she had two sons. After Berrigan's death in 1983, she married the British poet Doug Oliver and relocated to Paris, France.
Notley's writing and art responds to a broad spectrum of American culture. Her experiments with poetic forms and free verse owe as much to Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, and Ted Berrigan as they do to William Carlos Williams. Like them, she believes that she is writing primarily to express her own personal tone of voice.
Among the numerous collections of verse that Notley has published are INCIDENTALS IN THE DAY WORLD (1973), WHEN I WAS ALIVE (1980), WALTZING MATILDA (1981), MARGARET AND DUSTY (1985), and HOW SPRING COMES (1981) which received a 1982 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award. In addition to her poems, Notley wrote a short autobiography entitled TELL ME AGAIN (1982).
The Villae Voice writes: "Notley’s enjambments give a wink to straitlaced syntax, and thus convey the rush and ragged edges of actual talk, the "sheets of thoughts" the mind billows through. Drawn in by her conversational, if not confessional pitch– "May I never be afraid; especially of myself" –we are hardly prepared for the wrench she throws."
In addition to poetry, Notley has also experimented with the visual arts; her collection includes collages, watercolors, and sketches. Many of the collages are composed of everyday objects and images and are quite consistent with her poetry in that respect. A significant group of the collages are aimed at de-eroticizing images taken from pornographic magazines.
Friday, 10/30
- 12:00-2:00 PM: Alumni Writers Series presents Larry Dark. Part
of the Alumni Weekend Celebration.
Larry Dark has been the series editor of PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY
AWARDS since 1995. Before that he was the editor of four anthologies:
LITERARY OUTTAKES (Ballantine, 1990), THE LITERARY GHOST (The Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1991), THE LITERARY LOVER (Viking, 1993), and THE LITERARY
TRAVELER (Viking, 1994). He has a B.A. in philosophy from the University
of Pennsylvania (1981) and an MFA from Columbia University (1989). He
lives in New Jersey with his wife, Alice Elliott Dark, a fiction writer
and Penn graduate, and their son. Joining Larry on October 30 will be
Tina Pohlman,a Penn alumna and Larry's editor at Anchor Books.
PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS (http://www.boldtype.com/0998/ohenry/index.html) is an annual anthology of the year's best stories written by U.S. and Canadian writers and published in the approximately 250 U.S. and Canadian magazines consulted for the series. The awards were established in 1919 and have been published by Doubleday since that time. The series editor, Larry Dark, chooses 20 stories each year from among the 3,000 or so he reads. Since 1997, the top-three prize winners have been chosen from among these 20 stories by a three-member jury of writers. In 1998, the jurors were: Andrea Barrett, Mary Gaitskill, and Rick Moody.
Saturday, 10/31
HOMECOMING
- 12:00-4:00 PM Alumni Open House
- 2:00-4:00 PM Saturday Reading Project
- 4:00-7:00 PM Alumni Art Show Opening
