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. Read a 2008 interview with Max Apple in the online publication Nextbook.
Email: maxapple1@verizon.net
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
Charles Bernstein has published three collections of essays -- My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), and Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 1985; rpt Northwestern, 2001). 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
Deborah Burnham is a lecturer and advisor in the English Department at Penn. She also teaches writing courses through the Master of Liberal Arts program in Penn's College of General Studies. 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@writing.upenn.edu
Lorene Cary is the author of two novels, The Price of A Child, Philadelphia's and Buffalo, NY's One Book, One City choice for 2003, and Pride (1998), and a best-selling memoir, Black Ice. In 1998 Lorene Cary founded ART SANCTUARY, a series that brings excellent black artists to speak, perform and give workshops at the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark Building in North Philadelphia. Currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a 1998 recipient of the Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Cary has received The Philadelphia Award for civic service, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts Fellowship and honorary doctorates from Colby College in Maine, Keene State College in New Hampshire, and Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the Rev. Robert C. Smith, and daughters Laura and Zoë. Listen to Lorene Cary's September 23, 1998 reading at the Kelly Writers House (mp3 audio).
Email: lcary@mail.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 has been the writing partner of John Leguizamo for many years, co-writing with him screenplays such as Fugly, (under option to Universal Films), and she has been the producer of numerous feature and cable films, among them Undefeated, Pinero, and Joe the King (which won the 1999 Sundance Film festival Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award). She also developed and sold projects at all the major studios, cable stations and networks over the past fifteen years, as well as wrote the story ideas and treatments for many of these projects. Kathy is also a novelist. Under her maiden name, Kathleen DeMarco, she has written two novels: Cranberry Queen (a Book Sense 2001 pick), originally optioned by Miramax Films, and The Difference Between You and Me, both published by Miramax Books. Her newest book, the middle-grade novel Drizzle, will be published by Dial Books for Young Readers in March 2010, using her married name, Kathleen Van Cleve. Kathy took her B.S. and B.A. (Creative Writing) from Penn in 1988--a dual degree from the Wharton School and the College of Arts & Sciences. 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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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 or 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 a 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. Her writing has appeared in Country. Feedback, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Philadelphia Stories. Current projects include a study of West Indian foodways in West Philadelphia, and a multi-genre piece about the Midwest.
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:Paul Hendrickson's most recent book, Sons of Mississippi (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), a study of the legacy of racism in the families of seven Mississippi sheriffs of the 1960s, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune. In addition, it was named by many newspapers to their “Top 10” lists for books published in 2003. The research and writing, which took about five years, 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. Oh, yes: He’s deep into his next nonfiction book, which has to do with Ernest Hemingway.
Email: phendric@writing.upenn.edu
http://cds.aas.duke.edu/courses/brady.html//
Melissa Jensen is a best-selling author of historical and contemporary genre fiction. 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 MGA. She now divides her time between Philadelphia and Ireland, where she is researching a book on social life in early 19th century Dublin. Her next two books for Young Adults will be published by Penguin/Puffin in 2010.
Email: mj@melissajensen.com
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 ten books, including the National Book Award finalist, A SLANT OF 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, and Nothing But Ghosts. Her young adult novel The Heart Is Not a Size is due out in 2010. She 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, and she has judged numerous literary competitions. A frequent workshop leader and the strategic writing partner in a boutique communications firm, Kephart maintains a 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. He is currently finishing a book about the taxidermist-sculptor Carl Akeley, titled Kingdom Under Glass, to be published in 2010.
Email: jaykirk@comcast.net
Lynn Levin is the author of three collections of poems, Fair Creatures of an Hour (2009), Imaginarium (2005), and A Few Questions about Paradise (2000), both published by Loonfeather Press. Imaginarium was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's 2005 Book of the Year Award. Lynn Levin's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Boulevard, Washington Square Review, Hunger Mountain, 5 AM, Cimarron Review, Margie, Lilith, Confrontation, The North American Review, The Comstock Review, Per Contra, Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review, One Trick Pony, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, on Garrison Keillor's radio show, The Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily, and other places. A Bucks County, Pennsylvania Poet Laureate, Levin has also received two grants from the Leeway Foundation and eight Pushcart Prize nominations. In addition to teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, Lynn Levin teaches at Drexel University, where she is also executive producer of the TV show, The Drexel InterView.
Email: Iamblel@aol.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.
Email: whetstones@comcast.net
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
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.
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://go.philly.com/ricknicholsEmail: rnichols@phillynews.com
Bob Perelman has published over 15 volumes of poetry, most recently The Future of Memory (Roof Books) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press). His critical work focuses on poetry and modernism. His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press). He has edited Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press), a collection of talks by poets.
Email: perelman@english.upenn.edu
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 at Cigna in Center City, and a daughter who attends Bard College.
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. She is currently writing a novel about the Mozart family. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Southern Review, American Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and Other Voices. She has been listed among The Best American Short Stories and was a 1994 Pew Fellowship Finalist in Fiction. She is also a past recipient of the Leeway Foundation's Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is a 1980 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and has studied writing under Carlos Fuentes, Stanley Elkin and Paula Fox. Karen lives in Chestnut Hill with her husband and four young daughters.
Email: krile@writing.upenn.edu
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.
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. 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 (17) and Sylvia (14) 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: rsstrauss@comcast.net
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.comUsing 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.comElizabeth 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.
Kathryn Kitsi 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
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 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 received an MA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she held a Teaching Fellowship, and an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona, where she received the Minnie M. Torrance Scholarship in Creative Writing and the UA Foundation Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Redivider, The Pedestal Magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, the Scarsdale Inquirer, the Earth Times, and New York's daily Metro, and her short fiction was nominated for inclusion in Best New American Voices 2006. Other awards include a lectureship position at the Smithsonian Institution in 2004, and a month-long writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2005.
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.
Albert DiBartolomeo is the author of the novels The Vespers Tapes (Blood Confessions in paperback) and Fool's Gold. His short stories have appeared in Italian Americana. He has written for Reader's Digest Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Newark Star Ledger. He has been anthologized in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and Human Ecology. He is currently the editor of the Drexel Online Journal.
Email: adirbarto@writing.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.
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.
Daisy Fried won the Agnes Lynch Starrett award for her first book of poetry, She Didn't Mean to Do It (University of Pittsburgh, 2000), of which the poet Thom Gunn said "Maybe this is the book of the year, it has such range and it is so well-written. Her second book My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006) was a finalist for the 2005 James Laughlin Prize. She was recently the Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College and an '04-'05 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Leeway Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares for her poem "Shooting Kinesha." . Her poems have been published in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Triquarterly and many others; her book reviews have appeared in Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Threepenny Review. She holds a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College.
Email: daisyf1@juno.com
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.
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
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
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
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!
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.