Max Apple has published two collections of stories The Oranging of America, and Free Agents, two novels, Zip and Propheteers and two books of non-fiction, Roommates, and I Love Gootie. Roommates was made into a film as were two other screenplays, Smokey Bites the Dust and The Air Up There. Five of his books have been New York Times Notable Books. His stories and essays are widely anthologized and have appeared in Atlantic, Harpers, Esquire, and many literary magazines and in Best American Stories and Best Spiritual Writing. His essay, "The American Bakery" was selected by the New York Times as one of the best to appear in the first 100 years of the Book Review. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His Ph.D. is in 17th century literature. He has given readings at many universities and taught at Michigan, Stanford, NYU, Columbia, and Rice University where he held the Fox Chair in English. Max regularly hosts and introduces readings by eminent fiction writers, such as Meg Wolitzer.
Click here to listen to a recording of Max Apple's reading at the Kelly Writers House on September 25, 2001.
Email: maxapple1@verizon.net
Sam Apple's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, Parents Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was named a finalist for the PEN America award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005, he received the annual Faux Faulkner award. In 2004, he was a finalist for the Koret Award for Young Writers on Jewish Themes. Apple's next book, American Parent, will be published in 2008. Apple received his MFA from Columbia University and is currently an editor at the websites Nerve.com and Babble.com.
Herman Beavers came to Penn from Yale University, where he received his doctorate in American Studies in 1990 with a specialization in African American Literature. He is the author of Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, which was published in 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He also has a chap-book of poems, A Neighborhood of Feeling (1986) from Doris Publications. His poems have appeared in Black American Literature Forum, Whiskey Island, Rain, Cave Canem I and II, Dark Phrases, and the Cincinnati Poetry Review. Professor Beavers teaches courses in African American and American literature. He values dialogue in classroom settings and thinks it is important for students to talk to one another about writing and literature. He also believes that his courses are much more about questions than static answers, especially when it comes to matters of race, gender, and class. And despite having very well-defined ideas about the kind of literature he enjoys, Professor Beavers likes to think he is open to persuasion.
Email: hbeavers@english.upenn.edu
Susan Bee is a painter, editor, writer, and book artist who lives in New York City. She coedits with Mira Schor, M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online http://www.writing. upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/. Bee is currently coediting a special 25th year anniversary issue of the journal. The first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G was published in December 1986 and 20 issues were published over the next 10 years. In 2000, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, was published by Duke University Press. Bee has had solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, Kenyon College, William Paterson College, Virginia Lust Gallery, and Columbia University. Her artist's books include collaborations with Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Regis Bonvicino, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee teaches in the Art Criticism and Writing MFA program at the School of Visual Arts and in the MFA program at the Vermont College of the Arts. She is represented by Accola Griefen Gallery and A.I.R. Gallery in New York. She has had fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council for the Arts. Bee has lectured widely including at Kelly Writer’s House, the University of Caen (France), Maison de Poesie (Paris), the Drawing Center (NY), also in China, Korea, and Cuba.. She has a BA from Barnard College and a MA in Art from Hunter College. Her website is at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/ authors/bee/
Email: bee@bway.net
Charles Bernstein has published four collections of essays -- My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 1985; rpt Northwestern, 2001), and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays & Inventions (Chicago, 2011). He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, including All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), Girly Man (Chicago, 2006), With Strings (Chicago, 2001), Republics of Reality: 1975 - 1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000), Dark City (Sun & Moon, 1994), The Sophist (Sun & Moon, 1987; rpt Salt Publishing 2004), Islets/Irritations (Jordan Davies, 1983; rpt. Roof Books, 1992); and Controlling Interests (Roof, 1980). And he is the editor of several collections: Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1999), 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Duke, 1998), and The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (Roof, 1990), the audio CD Live at the Ear, and the poetics magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, whose first issue was published in 1978. Bernstein is executive editor of the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu) and co-director of PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound).
Home page: http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein
Email: charles.bernstein@
english.upenn.edu
Meredith Broussard journalist and editor, has edited two anthologies of strange and true stories about love gone wrong: The Dictionary of Failed Relationships (Three Rivers Press, 2003) and The Encyclopedia of Exes (Three Rivers Press, 2005). Her features, essays and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including Harper's, The Washington Post, Slate, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine and The Huffington Post. Broussard was awarded a 2003 Individual Creative Artist Special Opportunity Stipend by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has studied at the Breadloaf Writers Conference. She received her BA from Harvard University and her MFA from Columbia University.
Email: merbroussard@aol.com
Laynie Browne is the author of nine collections of poetry and two novels. Her most recent publications include: The Ivory Hour (Spuyten Duyvil, 2013), Roseate, Points of Gold (Dusie, 2011), and The Desires of Letters (Counterpath, 2010). Her work appears in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (2013) as well as in Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013). Her honors include: the National Poetry Series Award, the Contemporary Poetry Series Award, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry. She has taught at The University of Washington, Bothell, at Mills College, Naropa University, the University of Arizona and at Swarthmore College. Since 2011 she has been a mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project http://awwproject.org. Recent editorial projects include a collection of writings celebrating the life and work of poet Stacy Doris on http://www.thevolta.org. She is co-editor of I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2012).
Email: laynie.browne@gmail.com
Deborah Burnham is a lecturer and advisor in the English Department at Penn. For over twenty years, she headed the writing department and taught poetry at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. Her book, Anna and the Steel Mill, won the University Press prize from Texas Tech University. More recently, she's had poems in Poetry, 5 am and Negative Capability. She is completing a novel, Raising June, set in the era of the Vietnam War, that engages questions of political action and family responsibility.
Email: dburnham@english.upenn.edu
Lorene Cary new novel, If Sons, Then Heirs (Atria Books, April 2011), recounts a love story for our time while exploring a searing racial history that haunts—and impoverishes—its unforgettable characters. Publishers Weekly calls it: “an absorbing and moving tale.” Cary’s other books include: the best-selling memoir Black Ice, an American Library Association Notable Book for 1991 often taught in colleges and high schools; The Price of a Child, a 1995 novel chosen as the first One Book, One Philadelphia selection; Pride, a contemporary novel, and FREE! Great Escapes on the Underground Railroad, a collection of true-life stories for young readers, published in 2006.
In December 2010, the public opening of The President’s House on Independence Mall in Philadelphia introduced visitors to five videos, shot from Cary’s original scripts, depicting the lived of nine enslaved Africans in the household of President George Washington as well as the free black men and women who helped two of them run to freedom.
Cary founded Art Sanctuary in 1998. Now, more than 10,000 diverse participants enjoy the organization’s unique programs of excellent African-American arts and letters in inner-city Philadelphia. Signature events include the Celebration of Black Writing, at the National Historic Landmark Church of the Advocate, Temple University, and schools across the city. For arts activism, for her writing, and for her teaching as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Cary in 2003 received the Philadelphia Award, her city’s highest civic honor.
Cary’s essays have appeared in publications including Newsweek, Time, Essence, and O Magazine. She lectures nationwide and has received five honorary doctorates. She also serves as president of the Union Benevolent Society.
Lorene Cary is married to the Rev. Robert C. Smith; they live in Philadelphia and have two daughters, Laura and Zoë. Listen to Lorene Cary's September 23, 1998 reading at the Kelly Writers House (mp3 audio).
Email: lcary@artsanctuary.org
Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has written for nearly thirty years, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. He is the author of In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work (Hal Leonard, 2005) and Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters (Duke University Press, 1998). In addition, he coedited the third editions of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and The Rolling Stone Album Guide (both published by Random House, 1992), and edited Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (Duke, 1992). Most recently he edited Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer (Scribner, 2009). His awards include a 1988 Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category for his essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set "Crossroads," and three ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in writing about music. DeCurtis holds a Ph.D. in American literature from Indiana University and lives in New York City.
Email: ADeCurtis@aol.com
Kathleen De Marco Van Cleve is a novelist, screenwriter, film producer and teacher. Her screenplay, Fugly, co-written with John Leguizamo, and starring Leguizamo, Rosie Perez, Griffin Dunne and Radha Mitchell, finished filming early October 2010 in New York City. Her most recent novel, Drizzle, was published in March 2010 under her married name, Kathleen Van Cleve, and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and The Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books, and was named to Indiebound's KidsNext Spring 2010 list. She has produced the films Joe the King, (winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival), Pinero, (a Miramax release starring Benjamin Bratt) and Undefeated (an HBO film starring Leguizamo). Her other novels are Cranberry Queen (optioned by Miramax Films) and The Difference Between You and Me. She graduated with a dual degree from the Wharton School and the College of Arts & Sciences in 1988. She has been a consultant for NYU's Tisch School of the Arts M.F.A. dramatic writing program as well as for Tisch's undergraduate dramatic writing candidates. She lives with her husband and two young sons in Philadelphia.
Email: kathydemarco@writing.upenn.
edu
Home page: http://www.kathleenvancleve.com
Gregory Djanikian is Director of the Creative Writing Program. He has published five collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, and most recently, So I Will Till the Ground, all with Carnegie-Mellon University Press. His poems have appeared in such publications as The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, and in over 30 anthologies and textbooks. His awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Eunice Tietjens Prize and Friends of Literature Award from Poetry magazine, and the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center of Columbia University.
Email: djanikia@writing.upenn.edu
Stephen Fried is an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of five acclaimed books, including Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the West—One Meal at a Time (named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal) and Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia (which introduced the word “fashionista” into the English language and inspired the Emmy-winning film Gia with Angelina Jolie.) A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Fried has written for Vanity Fair, GQ, The Washington Post Magazine, Rolling Stone, Glamour, Ladies’ Home Journal, Parade and Philadelphia magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.
Email: stephenfried@comcast.net
Lise Funderburg studied at Reed College and the Columbia University School of Journalism, and her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, Salon, and Prevention. She has been a regular contributor since 2001 to O, The Oprah Magazine. In 2003, Funderburg won a Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has received support from The Leeway Foundation, The Open Society Institute, The Dick Goldensohn Fund for Journalists, and the Blue Mountain Center. She has been awarded residencies, twice, at both The Thurber House and The MacDowell Colony. Funderburg’s first book was a collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity (Morrow), which has become a core text in studies of American multiracial identity and race relations. Her newest book is called Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home (Free Press). Pig Candy could fit into several genres—including narrative nonfiction, memoir, travelogue, and biography—but essentially, it’s a book about life, death, and barbecue.
Email: lf@lisefunderburg.com
Jacqueline Goldfinger is a Barrymore Award-winning playwright based in Philadelphia, PA and the
Playwright-in-Residence at Azuka Theatre Company (M.F.A. University of Southern California; B.A.
Agnes Scott College). Her plays have been produced or developed in over 50 venues
in the United States. She is an Adjunct Professor of playwriting at the University of the Arts.
Kenny Goldsmith Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU. He teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He has been awarded the The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. A book of critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
More about Goldsmith can be found at:
http://http://epc.
buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/
http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith
Paul Hendrickson's most recent book, Hemingway's Boat, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 2011. He spent seven years on it. It was a national best-seller and a finalist in biography for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book previous to this, Sons of Mississippi, also from Knopf, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune. The research and writing were supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2005, Hendrickson worked for thirty years in daily journalism. He was a staff feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001. Eventually, he came to understand the truth of the old saying that the legs are the first to go, and that the honorable and difficult business of writing perishable pieces on deadline belonged to younger people. He needed to try to find a place--a home--where he could continue to work on books and the occasional magazine article and to be involved with gifted, creative people. So now, luck beyond dream, fortune beyond hope, he finds himself conducting writing workshops full time at Penn in advanced nonfiction.
The neophyte professor, hardly young anymore, was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied seven years for the missionary priesthood. This became the subject of his first book, published in 1983: Seminary: A Search. His other books are: Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996). They, too, were published by Knopf.
Hendrickson has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Penn State. He is married and lives with his family (world-class wife, two world-class sons) in Havertown, Pennsylvania. He has entered the terror, the "long joyful sickness"--as John Updike once called it--of the next book project. It has to do with Frank Lloyd Wright and is being supported at its outset by another National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.
Email: phendric@writing.upenn.edu
http://cds.aas.duke.
edu/courses/brady.html
http://www.arts.gov/features/writers/writersCMS/writer.php?id=
12_28
Michael S. Hennessey is the Managing Editor of PennSound, and author of the “PennSound Daily” column. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Recent critical work has appeared in English Studies in Canada, Interval(le)s, MELUS, and Redivider, with book chapters forthcoming in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later and a critical anthology on the audiobook. Creative work has appeared in EAOGH, What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, Fooling Around in Prose: An Anthology of Postmodern Fiction, and Red Letters, as well as the chapbook, Last Days in the Bomb Shelter (17 Narrower Poems),(Satellite 7 Press, 2008).
Melissa Jensen is a best-selling author of historical and contemporary genre fiction. Most recently, her young adult novel Falling in Love with English Boys was chosen as an official selection for the New York Public Library's Teen Summer Reading list. She has also written for numerous print media, including Philadelphia Style magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She grew up in San Francisco before coming to Penn, where she received both her BA and MA. She now divides her time between Philadelphia and Dublin, where she is researching a book on social and political life in early-20th century Ireland.
Email: mjens@sas.upenn.edu
Jamie-Lee Josselyn is the Associate Director for Recruitment at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and has previously worked at the Kelly Writers House as the Assistant to the Faculty Director and Coordinator of the Writers House Fellows Program. She has taught creative nonfiction writing at St. Paul’s School’s Advanced Studies Program in Concord, New Hampshire, at the Wharton School’s Advanced Management Education Conference, and in the Philadelphia public school system and has co-led book groups for Penn alumni in the Writers House Online Book Groups Program. She has worked as a teaching assistant for Al Filreis in many courses on contemporary literature. Her writing has been published in The Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, LOST Magazine, in the six-word memoir anthology It All Changed in an Instant, and elsewhere. Jamie-Lee has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Bennington College where she was the nonfiction editor of The Bennington Review.
Email: jjossely@writing.upenn.edu
Marion Kant is a musicologist and dance historian (Ph.D., Humboldt University: Romantic Ballet: an Inquiry into Gender). From the age of 14 she danced with the Komische Oper under the choreographer Jean Weidt. There she also worked as a dramaturge. She has taught at the Regieinstitut Berlin, Hochschule fuer Musik/ Theater Leipzig, the University of Surrey in Guildford, Cambridge University, King's College London, and now at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written extensively on romantic ballet in the 19th century, education through dance in the 19th and 20th centuries, concepts of modern dance in the early 20th century and dance in exile. Her recent research project looks at dance ideologies from 1800 to 2000. In 2001/2002 she was a fellow at the Centre of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In the past years, together with musicians Marshall Taylor (saxophone) and Sam Hsu (piano) she developed a concert series remembering "entartete Musik", music banned by the Nazis in 1930s Germany. Her publications include: "Auf der großen Straße. Jean Weidts Erinnerungen (Henschelverlag: Berlin 1984.) "Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz" (Henschelverlag: Berlin 1996. 2nd ed. 1999.) - English edition: Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (Berghahn Books: New York/Oxford, 2003) - and Giselle, commissioned by the State Opera, Berlin (Inselverlag: Frankfurt/Main 2001).
Email: mkant2@writing.upenn.edu
Beth Kephart is the author of fourteen books, including the National Book Award finalist, A Slant in the Sun; the BookSense pick, Ghosts in the Garden; the autobiography of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, Flow; and the critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Undercover, House of Dance, Nothing But Ghosts, The Heart is Not a Size, Dangerous Neighbors, You Are My Only, and Small Damages. In March 2013 she will release an illustrated historical novel about 1871 Philadelphia, Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent (New City Community Press/Temple University Press) and in August 2013, her book about the making and consequences of memoir, Handling the Truth, featuring work by her Penn students as well as the work of classic memoirists, will be released by Gotham. Two additional novels are set to follow. Kephart is a winner of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fiction grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Leeway grant, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. Kephart’s essays are frequently anthologized, she writes regularly for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, and a variety international publications, and she has judged numerous literary competitions. A frequent workshop leader and the strategic writing partner in a boutique communications firm, Kephart maintains an award-winning literary/photography blog at: http://www.beth-kephart. blogspot.com/.
Jay Kirk's fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in Harper's, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Peregrine, The Nation, Chicago Reader, Philadelphia City Paper, Saturday Nightt and Nervee. His work has been anthologized in Best American Crime Writing 2003, Best American Crime Writing 2004, and Best American Travel Writing 2009. He was also included in the anthology, Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine (New Press, 2008). He was a recipient of a 2005 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as a 2007 Individual Creative Artists Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His book about the taxidermist-sculptor Carl Akeley, titled Kingdom Under Glass, has recently been published by Henry Holt and Co.
Email: jaykirk@comcast.net
Lynn Levin, poet, writer, translator, is the author of three collections of poems: Fair Creatures of an Hour (2009), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium (2005), a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (2000), all published by Loonfeather Press. Lynn Levin's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Boulevard, Washington Square Review, Southwest Review, Cimarron Review, 5 AM, Hunger Mountain, Tiferet, The Poetry Miscellany, Kerem, Verse Daily, and on Garrison Keillor's radio show, The Writer's Almanac. She has published essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Alimentum, among other journals. She is currently involved in translating the work of Peruvian Andean poet Odi Gonzales.
Email: Iamblel@aol.com
Donna Jo Napoli is a linguist and a writer. She has published over 70 books for young people, from picture books to young adult novels, from historical fiction to contemporary funny tales to gothic horror, and, of special interest to her are fairytales, myths, and religious stories. Her books have won the Golden Kite, Sydney Taylor, Parents’ Choice Gold, and many other awards, and have been translated into many languages. Her degrees are from Harvard (BA in mathematics; PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures), with a postdoc at MIT (in Linguistics). Her website is http://www.donnajonapoli.com
Rick Nichols has been writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer for 30 years, most recently as a food columnist whose pieces are regularly anthologized in the collection, Best Food Writing. As a reporter, he covered politics in small Southern towns, and in Philadelphia was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for reportage on the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. As an editorial writer, he tackled health care reform, learned about the civil war in Nicaragua by bicycling across the country, and wrote endorsements in mayoral races. Before joining The Inquirer, he was state editor and later a columnist at The Raleigh News & Observer. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught journalism at Temple University. With his wife, Nancy Szokan, an editor at The Washington Post, he co-taught a seminar in 2004 entitled "Truth-telling in the Age of Opinion" at the University of Montana in Missoula. His radio commentaries are available at www.whyy.org/91FM/.
To read his recent print work or view a video go to http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists /rick_nichols/
Bob Perelman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published 19 books of poems, including: Iflife (N.Y: Roof Books, 2006); Playing Bodies, in collaboration with painter Francie Shaw (N. Y.: Granary Books, 2004); and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History and The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. His work can be accessed on PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound/x/Perelman.php.
Home Page: http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/
authors/perelman
Email: perelman@english.upenn.edu
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Keir Politz completed an MFA at Columbia University where he was a recipient of the John and Jane Smith Fellowship for excellence in screenwriting and one of five film department fellowships. His short film, A Piece Of America, won the Audience Choice award at the 2007 Columbia University Film Festival and was selected as one of only four U.S. films to be screened at the prestigious 2008 Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France. His feature film, Detonator, will screen as a special "Sneak Preview" at the 21st Philadelphia Film Festival, and he is currently developing his second feature film.
Dick Polman is the Maury Povich "writer in residence," a full-time member of the CPCW faculty, as well as a political columnist and daily blogger for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He spent 22 years on the Inquirer writing staff; most recently, as the national political writer from 1992 to 2006, he covered four presidential elections and dozens of Senate and House races nationwide. At other times, he was a foreign correspondent based in London; a baseball writer covering the Philadelphia Phillies; a general-assignment feature writer; and a longtime regular contributor to the newspaper's Sunday magazine, where he wrote long-form pieces about everything from Nazi war criminals to the comeback of the condom. Prior to the Inquirer, he was a metro columnist on the Hartford Courant, and was the founding editor of an alternative newspaper, the Hartford Advocate. Dick attended George Washington University, where he served as managing editor of the college newspaper, and graduated with a BA in Public Affairs in 1973. He first came to Penn in 1999, when he audited classes during a one-semester fellowship, and he started teaching at Penn part time in 2003. Dick and his wife, Elise Vider, live in Center City. They have a son, who works as a "solutions designer" for Comcast in Center City, and a daughter, who works as a website designer in San Francisco.
Email: polman@writing.upenn.edu
Karen Rile is the author of Winter Music, a novel set in Philadelphia, and numerous works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and Other Voices, and has been listed among The Best American Short Stories. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania.
Email: krile@writing.upenn.edu
Email: gkshaw@gmail.com
Ron Silliman has written and edited
over 30 books of poetry, critical theory and memoir, most
recently Wharf Hypothesis from Lines Press. His work has been translated into 12 languages.
Silliman’s anthology In the American Tree is the definitive gathering of language poetry and
his own
work is included in The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, The Oxford Anthology
of
Modern American Poetry, Poems for the Millennium and Against Expression: Anthology of
Conceptual
Writing. Among his awards, Silliman received the
Levinson Prize
from the Poetry
Foundation in 2010,
a Pew Fellowship, grants from the California and Pennsylvania Arts Councils and two literary
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow
at the University of Pennsylvania and a keynote poet of the 43rd Poetry International Festival in
Rotterdam later in the spring. His sculpture,
From
Northern
Soul (Bury Neon), is installed in
the
transit center of Bury, Lancashire, where it is a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail.
Silliman's Blog has received over 3.5 million
visits.
Taije Silverman is the author of a book of poetry, Houses Are
Fields, and has published individual poems in journals including
Poetry, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and
Agni. She is the recipient of the Emory University Creative
Writing Fellowship and the Vassar College W.K. Rose Fellowship. In 2011
she was a Fulbright Fellow in Bologna, Italy; her translations from the
Italian have been published in Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, The Atlanta
Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation.
Email: tjsilverman@hotmail.com
Robert Strauss is a journalist whose work primarily appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and the Philadelphia newspapers. He has been a reporter for Sports Illustrated, a feature writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, a news producer for KYW-TV in Philadelphia and a TV critic for the Asbury Park Press and Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the author of Daddy’s Little Goalie, a funny/sentimental memoir about being the father of girl jocks, and he also has an online column of the same name (“Daddy’s Little Goalie”) with Gannett. He is working on another memoir about going to 100 countries as a nerd/adventure traveler – hopefully the male nebbish equivalent of Eat, Pray, Love. Since he was in fifth grade and wrote the classic, "The Slick Second Baseman," Strauss has always wanted a career in writing and is glad to have had the chance. He is also a manic, if somewhat untalented, basketball and piano player. He loves to travel, but especially likes to country-count, a prospect that often has his children Ella (19) and Sylvia (16) rolling their eyes as they have, for instance, lunch in Liechtenstein or San Marino or a quick border crossing to Gibraltar. Strauss and his family live in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He is married to journalist Susan Warner.
Email: rsethstrauss@verizon.net
Michelle Taransky is the author of Barn Burned, Then, selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. Taransky teaches critical and creative writing at University of Pennsylvania and poetry workshops at Temple University and works as assistant to the director at Kelly Writers House. Taransky is also the Reviews Editor for the online poetry and poetics magazine Jacket2 (jacket2.org).
Email: taransky@writing.upenn.edu
Peter Tarr's career in journalism, which spans more than 25 years, has been focused on international affairs, and, more recently, scientific subject matter, especially molecular biology, biotechnology, and neuroscience. He has a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, having specialized in science writing. He also has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American History from Cornell University. While at Cornell he developed and for several years taught a writing course focusing on journalistic ethics. A former newspaper reporter, foreign correspondent for the Asian Wall Street Journal, and editor at various U.S.-based science and medical publications, he is currently Senior Science Writer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island and a contributor to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Bulletin among other publications. He is engaged in two book projects, A Certain Blindness (U.S. intellectual history); and Science Nationalism: National Science Policy in a Transnational Age (History of Science).
Email: tarr123@gmail.com
Elizabeth Van Doren has been a publisher and editor of children's books for more than twenty years. She has published a wide variety of award- winning books in all genres, from picture books to middle grade novels to young adult fiction. She has worked with many well-known and highly- lauded writers including Jane Yolen, Mary Ann Hoberman, Andrea and Brian Pinkney, Alison McGhee, Sarah Weeks, and Leo and Diane Dillon and has nurtured the careers of successful new writers, most notable among them Deborah Wiles, whose second novel, Each Little Bird that Sings, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other books Van Doren has edited have been named Book Sense Children's Pick, ALA Notable Book, Child Magazine Best Book of the Year, Coretta Scott King Honor Book, New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year, among many other awards and honors. In addition to acquiring, editing, and publishing books, Van Doren has also spoken frequently at writers' conferences and has led writing workshops. The most important thing she looks for in a manuscript is whether the book is emotionally resonant for children. As a former high school teacher and a parent, she is very attuned to children's interests and what sparks their imagination.
Email: liz.vandoren@gmail.com
Kathryn Watterson teaches fiction and nonfiction, as well as seminars such as “Learning from the Harlem Renaissance” and “Considering Race, Class & Punishment in the American System.” Her books, three of which have been chosen as New York Times most Notable Books, include Not by the Sword: How a Cantor Transformed a Klansman (winner of the 1996 Christopher Award); You Must Be Dreaming (basis of the NBC movie, "Betrayal of Trust"); Growing Into Love, and Women in Prison: Inside the Concrete Womb (basis of an ABC documentary, "Women in Prison"). Her essays and articles appear in the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the International Herald Tribune, and her short stories in Northeast Corridor, Santa Monica Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She is project director and editor of The North’s Most Southern Town: An Oral History of African-American Princeton, 1900-2000, and part of PLP TheUnity (Peace, Love & Power), a performance arts ensemble which plays improvisational, meditative, jazzy music utilizing African rhythms, drums, percussion, and wind instruments, spoken word and storytelling. She is completing a novel in progress and a short story collection.
Email: kwatters@sas.upenn.edu
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is the author of five books of poetry:
Dear Future Boyfriend, Hot Teen Slut, Working Class Represent, Oh,
Terrible Youth and Everything is Everything. She is also the
author of the non-fiction book, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour
Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, which The
Washington Post named as one of five Notable Books on Exploring
Poetry in 2008. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Cristin moved to New
York City at the age of 17. At age 19, she founded the three-time
National Poetry Slam championship poetry series NYC-Urbana, which is
still held weekly at the NYC's famed Bowery Poetry Club. Her work has
been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendancies, Rattle,
Barrelhouse, decomP, kill author, Conduit and La Petite Zine,
among others. She has lectured and performed throughout the U.S. and
Australia, including the Sydney Opera House in Australia (2003), Joe's
Pub in New York City (2002), the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles (2010) and
over 100 universities and colleges. Cristin is using her ArtsEdge
residency to write a book on the life and times of Thomas Dent Mutter,
founder of Philadelphia's (in)famous Mutter Museum, and will be teaching
a course on non-fiction poetry and prose in the Spring semester. For
more information, please visit her website at:
http://www.aptowicz.com/
Thomas Devaney is poet, critic, and a Senior Writing Fellow in the Critical Writing Program, English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2002 he began teaching in the Creative Writing Program and has taught in the Critical Writing Program at Penn fulltime since 2005. In 2008 he was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Critical Writing Program. He is the author of A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007), Letters to Ernesto Neto ( Germ Folios, 2005), and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999). He was the editor of The Art of the Book Lunch (Van Pelt Books, 2009) and is the editor of ON. And On Screen, a website that pairs videos and poems (http://www.onandonscreen.net/). Devaney received his MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1998 where he was the student of Allen Ginsberg. In 2001 he joined the Kelly Writers House, Penn's literary hub, for four years as program coordinator. His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, jubliat, Fence, Jacket, and online at PennSound. Anthologies include A Best of FENCE: The First Nine Years (FENCE Books, 2009), POEM: Poets On (an) Exchange Mission (Fish Drum/Double Change, 2009 bilingual French-English edition), Walt Whitman, Hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point Press and Editions Joca Seria, 2005) and American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon 2000). His reviews and essays have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket, and Rain Taxi.
Home page: http://www.thomasdevaney.net
Email: tdevaney@sas.upenn.edu
Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), and three books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003) and American Tatts (Chax 2004) and Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006). His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000 (Scribner 2000), Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner 2004) and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present (Scribner 2003), among other places. He is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001) and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. He has been invited to read poems all over the US, and in London, Cambridge and Berlin, and his poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. As founder and editor of The Drunken Boat, a Philadelphia literary journal, he published the work of poets and artists as well as anonymous "found" literature in the form of letters and journals. He is on the Philadelphia Art in City Hall Advisory Committee and is active within the community of Philadelphia's alternative galleries, cooperatives, and non-profit arts organizations. In addition to his writing and visual arts activities, Mr. Dinh acted as was Guest Curator of the exhibit "Toys and Incense" at the Levy Gallery at Moore College of Art and Design in which the role of improvisation and the play in contemporary visual art was explored.
Marcella Durand’s recent books include Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh published by Little Red Leaves in 2009; Area, published by Belladonna Books in 2008 as part of the Council of Literary Magazines and Small Press’s FACE OUT program, and Traffic & Weather, a site-specific book-length poem written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in downtown Manhattan (Futurepoem Books, 2008). She has collaborated with artists on various projects, including most recently a collaboration with New Orleans artist Karoline Schleh titled, “Stare: What Wild New World Is This?” (exhibited at Barrister’s Gallery, Fall 2010). She has talked about the potential intersections of poetry and ecology at Kelly Writers House, Poets House, Small Press Traffic, Naropa University, and other venues. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Nation, Ecopoetics, NYFA Current, Conjunctions, The Poker, HOW(2), Critiphoria, The Denver Quarterly, and other journals. She was a 2009 fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Email: marcelladurand@sprynet.com
PennSound page: http://writing.upenn
.edu/pennsound/x/Durand.php
PDF of Deep Eco Pré: http://
littleredleaves.com/ebooks/catalog/
tina-darragh-marcella-durand-deep-eco-pre.html
Lee Eisenberg, a Penn alumnus, spent seventeen years at Esquire, where he served as editor-in-chief through the 1980s. In 1983, he conceived and commissioned the magazine's widely admired Fiftieth Anniversary issues, including "50 Who Made the Difference," which received a National Magazine Award. In 1995, Eisenberg was hired to oversee creative development at TIME magazine. He helped launch TIME for Kids, a newsmagazine for children, and was involved with many of TIME's initial online activities. He also worked on a number of special issues and projects, including a two-year TIME-CBS News collaboration known as The TIME 100, which culminated with the selection of TIME's Person of the Century. In 1999, Eisenberg was appointed Executive Vice President and Creative Director at Lands' End, where he oversaw all creative and marketing activities. In 2003, he was promoted to the company's Office of the President, and served as Chief Creative and Administrative Officer. He resigned in March 2004 to begin work on The Number: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life(Free Press; January 10, 2006). Eisenberg has written numerous magazine articles and columns, as well as several books. Titles include The Ultimate Fishing Book (Houghton Mifflin,) Atlantic City: 100 Years of Ocean Madness (Clarkson Potter,) and Breaking Eighty (Hyperion Press.) His work has appeared in Fortune, Money, and The New York Times, among many other publications.
Tom Ferrick, Jr. is a journalist with more than 30 years of experience covering breaking news and news features, government, politics and investigations. In his years at The Philadelphia Inquirer, he worked as state government reporter and City Hall bureau chief, as national reporter, chief political writer, investigative reporter and poverty writer. He helped establish the paper's Computer Assisted Reporting unit. For eight years, he was an Inquirer metro columnist. He currently writes a weekly column that appears on the paper's OpEd page.
Kate Fodor is a recipient of the Kennedy Center's Roger L. Stevens Award, the National Theater Conference's Barrie Stavis Award, a Joseph Jefferson Citation, an After Dark Award, and a finalist position for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her play 100 Saints You Should Know had a sold-out run this year Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Publication of 100 Saints is forthcoming from Dramatists Play Service, and the script will be excerpted in Smith & Kraus' Best Stage Scenes and Best Men's Monologues anthologies for 2007. Kate's play, Hannah and Martin, had an Off-Broadway production featuring David Strathairn in 2004 and subsequent productions in cities around the U.S. and abroad. Hannah and Martin has been published by Dramatists Play Service and anthologized in The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize: Six Important New Plays by Women from the 25th Anniversary Year (Smith and Kraus). The plays were developed at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Hartford Stage, and Chautauqua Theater Company. Kate is currently working on commissions from the Mark Taper Forum and Epic Theater Ensemble. In addition, she has a screenplay under development with Killer Films and is developing a television series with Killer and the fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi. In 2004, Kate was named one of "Eight to Watch" in the theater world by The New York Times.
Poet, scholar, and multimedia artist Christopher Funkhouser is a leading researcher in the developing genre of digital poetry. In 2009, the Associated Press commissioned him to prepare digital poems for the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration. He is author of a major documentary study, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series at University of Alabama Press (2007). An eBook (CD-ROM), Selections 2.0, was issued by the Faculty of Creative Multimedia at Multimedia University (2006). He is a member of the scientific review committee of the digital literature journal regards croisés, based at Université Paris 8, and has produced and edited many publications online and in-print, including an early Internet-based poetry magazine, (We 17, 1993), and the first literary journal on CD-ROM in the United States (The Little Magazine, Vol. 21, 1995). Since 1986 he has been an editor with We Press, with whom he has produced poetry in a variety of media. He is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Multimedia University in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, and in 2007 he was on the faculty of the summer writing program at Naropa University.
Home Page: http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous
Erin Gautsche is the Program Coordinator for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and coordinates the 300+ free and public literary programs that the Writers House offers every year, and produces of the long-running monthly radio show, “LIVE at the Writers House” on 88.5-FM WXPN. She runs the 15th Room Press, a division of the Common Press a collaborative letterpress project at Penn. She is a member of the arts advisory board for the First Person Festival, the only national festival dedicated to documentary and memoir writing. She is a graduate of Goshen College with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She has an MLA from the University of Pennsylvania in post-war poetics, art history, and fiction writing. She has led writing workshops for children in Indiana and Guatemala, and reading and writing groups for adults in Philadelphia and an online book group for Penn alumni in the Writers House Online Book Groups Program.
Bruce Graham is a playwright whose plays include Burkie, Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar & Grille, Minor Demons, Moon Over The Brewery, The Champagne Charlie Stakes, Belmont Avenue Social Club, Desperate Affection, Coyote on a Fence, and According to Goldman. Coyote on a Fence was the winner of the Rosenthal Prize and opened on London's West End starring Ben Cross. His one man show The Philly Fan was recently revived for a third run. Two new plays, Dex and Julie Sittin' In A Tree (Arden Theatre) and Full Figured, Loves to Dance (Theatre Exile) opened in January '07. Feature film credits include Dunston Checks In, Anastasia,and Steal This Movie and his credits continue with the T.V. movies, Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, The Christmas Secret, Ring of Endless Light (2003 Humanitas Award Winner - Best Children's Teleplay), Right on Track, and Tiger Cruise. He has also written for the television programs Roseanne, and Leg Work. He is also the author (with co-writer Michele Volansky) of The Collaborative Playwright, a Practical Guide to Getting Your Play Written, which was recently published by Heinemann. Graham has received grants from the Pew Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and was a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation Statuette Award. He currently teaches playwriting and film courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. Graham lives in Media, Pennsylvania, with Stephanie and their daughter, Kendall.
Carl Haber is a screenwriter, director and producer with numerous credits in film, theater and TV. He has written stories and screenplays for Hollywood movies and independent films, as well as original motion pictures and TV movies in Italy, the Czech Republic, and Brazil. He founded and led a workshop in Rome for professional actors, and taught directing, production and acting at the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic, where he supervised nearly 1,000 student scripts and films and served as faculty chair. A member of the Writers’ Guild of America since 1988, a Philadelphia native, and a Penn alumnus, Carl Haber is currently developing several new feature films based on scripts he wrote, in Europe and the US, including projects to shoot in Philadelphia.
Marc Lapadula graduated cum laude from the Univ. of Pa. in 1983. He studied Irish and English Drama at Exeter College, Oxford University and received his M.A. from Malcolm Bradbury's Creative Writing Workshop at the Univ. of East Anglia. In 1987, he graduated from the Univ. of Iowa Playwrights' Workshop with his M.F.A. In addition to Penn, he teaches playwriting, screenwriting and film analysis courses at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His plays have been produced off-Broadway and in various regional festivals. His play Dancer was published and produced in 2001 and was presented in New York and Washington DC. He has been commissioned for three screenplays: Distant Influence, Night Bloom and an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog.
Email: lapadula13@aol.com
Rachel Levitsky is a practitioner of a hybrid form of poetry, one
that frequently and freely crosses the boundaries of verse and prose,
imagination and critique, story and polemic. In addition to her book
length poem Under the Sun, published by Futurepoem in 2003, she
is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999),
Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The
Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and
2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Her second full-length volume,
another serial work, is called NEIGHBOR, and will be out from Ugly
Duckling Presse in 2009. Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which
(one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San
Francisco. Her work is published in magazines such as The Recluse,
Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum,
Lungfull! and the anthologies, Boog City (vol. I & II), Bowery
Women, and 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology.
Recently her work was translated into Icelandic for the anthology
131.839 Slög Med Bilum by poet Eiríkur Örn Nordahl and into
Japanese for the Tokyo Poetry Festival Anthology by poet Kyung-Mi Park.
Online poetry and critical essays can be found on such sites as
Narrativity, Duration Press, How2, and Web Conjunctions.
She has taught poetry workshops at Woodland Pattern, Naropa University,
Poets House, The Poetry Project and Pratt Institute.
Rachel Levitsky is also the founder and co-director of Belladonna* which
is an event and publication series she began in 1999 in order to explore
and advance feminist avant-garde poetics. Now in its tenth year,
Belladonna* has hosted around 150 women and men whose writing is
formally adventurous and politically engaged.
Weblinks:
http:
//holloway.english.berkeley. edu/Levitsky/Levitsky.html
http://delirioushem.
blogspot.com/2008/02/dim-sum-rachel-levitsky.html
http://www.necessetics.com
/rachel.html
http://
www.chax.org/eoagh/issue3/ issuethree/levitsky.html
http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/
online_archive/v2_4_2006/current /forum/levitsky.html
Email: rachellevitsky@gmail.com
Jessica Lowenthal is a poet and Director of the Kelly Writers House.
She holds an MA in literature from Penn and an MFA in poetry from the
Iowa Writers Workshop. Lowenthal's work has appeared in various journals
(Apex of the M, Colorado Review, The Germ, Talisman, and
elsewhere) and her chapbook, as if in turning, was published by
Burning Deck Press.
Emial: jalowent@writing.upenn.edu
Diane McKinney-Whetstone is the author of three critically acclaimed novels: Tumbling (William Morrow, 1996; Scribner, 1997), Tempest Rising ( William Morrow, 1998; Quill, 1999), and Blues Dancing (William Morrow, 1999). Her short fiction has appeared in the Anthology, The Bluelight Corner, and in the Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has been a regular contributor to Philadelphia Magazine, and her essays have also appeared in Essence. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a special citation from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia for an outstanding work of fiction by a Philadelphia author, an award from the Zora Neale Hurston Society for creative contribution to literature, and resolutions from the City of Philadelphia and Senate of Pennsylvania for her portrayal of urban life. She is a past recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant and has lectured widely on the writing process. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
Liz Moore studied literature and creative writing at Barnard College, where she began her first novel, The Words of Every Song (Broadway 2007). She received her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. There, she studied with Peter Carey, Colum McCann, and Nathan Englander, and also taught creative writing courses to undergraduate students. Moore is the recipient of the 2009 ArtsEdge Residency through the Kelly Writers House. She currently teaches creative writing and composition at Holy Family University in northeast Philadelphia, and she's at work on her second novel.
Email: lizmoore1234@gmail.com
Tracie Morris is a multi-disciplinary poet who has worked in theater, dance, music and film. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia. Primarily known as a "musical poet," Tracie has worked with an extensive range of internationally recognized musicians and other artists. She has participated in a dozen recording projects. Her sound poetry has most recently been featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. She is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Creative Capital Fellowship, the National Haiku Slam Championship and an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. She is the author of two poetry collections, Intermission and Chap-T-her Won.
She has delivered academic papers at the New York University Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure Conference, The Hemispheric Conference in Lima, Peru, The Langston Hughes Centenary Conference at Yale University, Poetry and the Public Sphere at Rutgers University and the African-American Poetry Conference for the Poetry Society of America.
Her poetry has been anthologized in literary magazines, newspapers and books including 360 Degrees: A Revolution of Black Poets, Listen Up!, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and Soul. Her words have also been featured in commissioned pieces for several organizations including Aaron Davis Hall, the International Festival for the Arts, The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace and Yale Repertory Theater for choreographer Ralph Lemon. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University
Matthew Neff teaches printmaking in the Undergraduate Fine Art Department at Penn. He received his B.A. (Art History) and B.F.A. (Painting) from Indiana University, and his M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. His exhibitions include: the MFA Thesis Group Exhibition, the Ice Box Project Space, Philadelphia, PA (2005); Solo Painting Exhibition, Big Jar Books, Philadelphia, PA (2003); and Group Exhibitions, Sofa Gallery, Bloomington, IN (2002, 2001). He held an internship at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY in 2000.
Stephanie Reents received her B.A. from Amherst College, and a second B.A. from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona, and her short stories have been published in Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 among other places. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University in 2002-2003, and was recently a scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is currently finishing a novel set in Oxford about severed limbs and disappearing gargoyles.
Greg Romero is a playwright/theater artist, originally from Louisiana, and the first Resident Writer of the ArtsEdge Residency created by Kelly Writers House and the University of Pennsylvania. Currently based in Philadelphia, his works include The Most Beautiful Lullaby You’ve Ever Heard, The Milky Way Cabaret, The Mishumaa, and Dandelion Momma, which have been produced off-off Broadway by City Attic Theatre and Working Man’s Clothes Productions, and across the country by Salvage Vanguard Theater, Rude Mechanicals Theatre Collective, Theater In My Basement, Specific Gravity Ensemble, Little Fish Theatre, City Theater Company, Gobotrick Theatre Company, Audacity Productions and in the bathrooms of Actors Theatre of Louisville. He has been a finalist for the Heideman Award, and a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award. Romero has collaborated several times with electronic music composer Mike Vernusky on such projects as The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting, The Eulogy Project, and currently, Radio Ghosts, in a form recently called “electro-theater”. He has been commissioned by The Cardboard Box Collaborative, Austin Script Works, and Audacity Theatre Lab, and is a member of Philadelphia Dramatists Center, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, The Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis, and The Dramatists Guild of America. His works have been published by Heinemann Press and Playscripts, Inc. He has taught at The University of the Arts, The Wilma Theater, Philadelphia Dramatists Center, and The Eugene O’Neill National Theater Institute. Romero received a BA in Liberal Arts from the Louisiana Scholars College and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas-Austin where he held the James A. Michener Fellowship.
Email: gregoryromero@yahoo.com
Mark Rosenthal, a graduate of Temple University, the University of Vermont, and the University of the Pacific (D.A. in Medieval Studies) has been a highly respected Hollywood screenwriter for nearly twenty years. His film credits as a screenwriter include Mona Lisa Smile, Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Mercury Rising, Mighty Joe Young, The Beverly Hillbillies, Star Trek VI, Superman IV, and Jewel of the Nile. His latest projects, with co-writer Lawrence Konner, are screenplays for Flicka (Fox 2005) and Eragon (Fox 2005). In addition to his active career in the film world, he has lectured extensively at film classes, seminars, and universities, and has worked with numerous arts organizations.
Alec Sokolow was born in New York City in 1963, and graduated from Penn with a B.A. in Communications (1985) and four varsity letters playing squash on the Penn team. His first paying writing job was as a contributor to National Lampoon Magazine, and later went on to be a staff writer and segment producer on The Late Show (1987), The Wilton North Report (1988) and The Arsenio Hall Show (1988-89). He is author or co-author of 47 screenplays including Toy Story, (Academy Award nomination for screenwriting), Money Talks, Goodbye Lover Cheaper By the Dozen, and Garfield, five TV pilot teleplays, one musical play, Monkey Love, a children's book, The Outcastics, and one low budget monster musical, Frankenstein Sings!
Using both digital and analog methods, Tricia merges type and image in her work. Since 2000, she’s been running her own letterpress design studio—Pointed Press—creating custom book and print work for commercial clients and collaborating with other artists and international writers. Clients have included Blank Rome, Comcast, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her studio is located in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, slightly south of Philadelphia.
She is a book artist, designer, conceptual thinker, printmaker, and experiments with new forms of media to execute her ideas. She is inspired by information design, film, language, maps, music and typography.
Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Visual Communications at the University of Delaware; as well as a Lecturer at The University of Pennsylvania. She earned her BA from West Virginia University and her MFA from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia.
Her books are in collections throughout the country.
Email: tricia@pointedpress.com
Home page: http://triciatreacy.com
Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English at Temple University, works in early modern literature, British, American, and foreign poetic traditions, translation theory and history, and literary translation. He is the author of Our Halcyon Dayes: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture (1989), The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), and The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998). He is the editor of the anthology of essays, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), and of The Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed. 2004), a survey of translation theory from antiquity to the present.
He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998) and the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000). Recent articles and reviews have appeared in New York Times Book Review, Performance Research, Translation and Literature, and Yale Journal of Criticism. He is a member of the editorial boards of Reformation: The Journal of the Tyndale Society and The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication. In 1998, he edited a special issue of The Translator devoted to translation and minority.
His translations from the Italian include Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (1983), I.U. Tarchetti's Fantastic Tales (1992), Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's collection of real and imaginary biographies, The Temple of Iconoclasts (2000), Antonia Pozzi''s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), Italy: A Traveler's Literary Companion (2003), and Melissa P.'s fictionalized memoir, 100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed (2004). His translation projects have won awards and grants from the PEN American Center (1980), the Italian government (1983), the National Endowment for the Arts (1983, 1999), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989). In 1999, he held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in translation studies at the Universitat de Vic (Spain).
Michael Vitez has been a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer since 1985. He has covered a wide range of assignments, including political conventions, the World Series, elections in Haiti, the funeral of Princes Diana, and has written a twice-weekly column about ordinary people and the extraordinary things they do. He was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University in 2000, teaching narrative writing, and was a Michigan Journalism Fellow in 1994-95. He has just completed a book, Rocky Stories, Tales of Love, Hope and Happiness from America's Most Famous Steps, (Paul Dry Books, 2006), a book, co-authored with Inquirer photographer Tom Gralish, about people from all over the nation and world who still come to the Philadelphia Museum of Art every day to run the steps like Rocky Balboa. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a series of narratives he wrote about five individuals and the medical choices they faced, with their families, at the end of their lives.
Andy Wolk has been an acclaimed screenwriter and director in Los Angeles for many years. He received the Writer's Guild Award for Natica Jackson starring Michelle Pfeiffer and was nominated by the Writer's Guild for the movies Criminal Justice and Deliberate Intent, each of which he also directed. He has written screenplays for every studio, and teleplays and pilots for every network including HBO's Emmy-winning From the Earth to the Moon. He has directed films for features, cable, and network along with episodes of numerous shows including The Sopranos, The Practice, Criminal Minds, and Without a Trace. Mr. Wolk has taught extensively and served as a Creative Adviser and Artistic Director for the Sundance Institute's Screenwriting Labs. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded him a Thouron Scholarship, and he has an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Courtney Zoffness Courtney Zoffness graduated from Penn with a BA cum laude in English, where she founded and ran the "Speakeasy" open mic series at the Kelly Writers House. She went on to receive an MA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University, where she was a teaching fellow, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona, where she received the Minnie M. Torrance Scholarship in creative writing and a UA Foundation Award. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Washington Square, Tampa Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Redivider, the international Fish Prize Stories, the New York Metro, the United-Nations-sponsored Earth Times, of which she was managing editor. She’s also been honored by residency scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Courtney was a visiting assistant professor at Allegheny College from 2009-2010, and an international faculty member at the University of Freiburg in Germany in summer 2010. Currently she’s a Davenport College Teaching Fellow in creative writing at Yale University.