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January 2009

Thursday, 1/1

Friday, 1/2

Saturday, 1/3

Sunday, 1/4

Monday, 1/5

Tuesday, 1/6

Wednesday, 1/7

Thursday, 1/8

Friday, 1/9

Saturday, 1/10

Sunday, 1/11

Monday, 1/12

Tuesday, 1/13

Wednesday, 1/14

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 1/15

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: "A Murder of Ravens," featuring multiple readings of "The Raven" (by Edgar Allan Poe) to mark Poe's 200th birthday


listen: to an audio recording of this event
watch: view a video recording of this program via KWH-TV

Hosted by Thomas Devaney, the program will include readings of "The Raven" by Daniel Hoffman, Shonni Enelow (reading Baudelaire's translation of the poem) and Edward Pettit; a group adaption of the poem by Michael Tom Vassallo, Kaegan Sparks, and Thomson Guster; and an excerpted screening of the infamous rendition by The Simpsons.

Thomas Devaney's essay "The Absolute Literary Case" is a pamphlet published by the Philadelphia Free Library for their current exhibition on Poe, "Quote the Raven."

Shonni Enelow is a playwright and doctoral student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Hoffman's is author of the book Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, which remains a classic study on Poe and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1971. He is also the author of The Whole Nine Yards: Longer Poems.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 1/16

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 1/17

Sunday, 1/18

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)


Monday, 1/19

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 1/20

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Theorizing presents Amy Hollywood: "Don't Touch Me." Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Romance Languages.

"Don't Touch Me" juxtaposes texts and images from across historical periods and across genres — Susan Howe, Georges Bataille, Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cornelia Parker, Bernard of Clairvaux — in a reflection on writing the history of gender, race, and Christian devotion.

Amy Hollywood has been teaching at the Harvard Divinity School since 2005 after teaching at Rhodes College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Chicago. She is a historian of Christian thought specializing in mysticism, with strong interests in feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her first book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995) received the International Congress of Medieval Studies' Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies. Her second book, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002), deals with Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray and their fascination with excessive bodily and affective forms of Christian mysticism. Professor Hollywood is currently co-editing, with Patricia Beckman, the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism and completing a book of essays to be called "Acute Melancholia." She is also the editor of the Gender, Theory, and Religions Series for Columbia University Press.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 1/21

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 1/22

7:30 PM in the Arts Cafe: a workshop presentation of "The Travel Plays," short works by ArtsEdge Resident Greg Romero. Co-sponsored by Philadelphia Dramatists Center (PDC).


Greg Romero wrote "The Travel Plays" according to a set of self-determined rules. Each of the 31 plays is a gift for one of the 31 people who donated money to fund the playwright's travel from Philadelphia to Dallas in the spring of 2008. Romero determined setting and page length for each play by calculating the city where each gift would land him as well as the number of states he'd pass through (one page per state). Each play includes a gift exchange and one item from the previous locale. Moving through time, place and American history, "The Travel Plays" meet Walt Whitman, Martha Washington, Elvis Presley and a giant elephant. They make a wacky textured tapestry of histories out of theatrical gift-exchanges.

Greg Romero is a playwright/theater artist, originally from Louisiana. Currently based in Philadelphia, his works include The Most Beautiful Lullaby You've Ever Heard, The Milky Way Cabaret, The Mishumaa, and Dandelion Momma, and 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, and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Romero's work explores memory, imagination, pain, dreams, rites of passage, the overlapping of time, and the flawed and fascinating guts and souls of human beings. Inspired and haunted by space, Romero has created work performed in elevators, porches, warehouses, loft apartments, punk stages, museums, basement crawl spaces, and public bathrooms. Romero has also collaborated several times with electronic music composer Mike Vernusky on live performance projects including The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting, The Eulogy Project, and currently, Radio Ghosts in a form they are calling "electro-theater." Romero 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, and The Dramatists Guild of America. He has been a finalist for the Heideman Award, a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award and his works have been published by Heinemann Press and Playscripts, Inc. 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. He has taught Playwriting at The Eugene O'Neill National Theater Institute, The Wilma Theater, and Philadelphia Dramatists Center and taught Theater at The University of the Arts and Saint Joseph's University. Most recently, Romero was selected as the first-ever Resident Writer of the ArtsEdge Residency, created by The Kelly Writers House and The University of Pennsylvania.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 1/23

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 1/24

1:00 PM - 3:00 PM in the KWH: WriteOn! meets.

For more information, contact Amanda J. Steren at amandajsteren@gmail.com

Sunday, 1/25

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)