January 2022

Saturday, 1/1

Sunday, 1/2

Monday, 1/3

Tuesday, 1/4

Wednesday, 1/5

Thursday, 1/6

Friday, 1/7

Saturday, 1/8

Sunday, 1/9

Monday, 1/10

Tuesday, 1/11

Wednesday, 1/12

Thursday, 1/13

Friday, 1/14

Saturday, 1/15

Sunday, 1/16

Monday, 1/17

Tuesday, 1/18

Wednesday, 1/19

Broadside Giveaway

6:00 PM in the Arts Café

Hosted by Mary Tasillo and Rachel Dennis

EVENT POSTPONED

We're opening up our Robinson Press and Common Press archives for a special broadside viewing and giveaway. Come join us to look at some of the amazing work produced at Penn’s letterpress studio, and take home some broadsides to call your own. Prints on display from a decade of letterpress projects include limited edition prints of poems and writing by Herman Beavers, Otter Jung-Allen, Bernadette Mayer, Orchid Tierney, Weike Wang, and many others. To see some of the Robinson Press archive online, go here. To find out more about letterpress work at Penn, visit the Common Press website.

Thursday, 1/20

MIND OF WINTER

A discussion of "The Snow Man" led by Al Filreis

7:00 PM (ET) on Zoom

video: | Media.SAS

In January of every year, the Writers House Planning Committee embraces the post-holiday doldrums with a celebration of winter's comforts, inspired by Wallace Stevens's chilly poem, "The Snow Man." This year, we'll gather on Zoom for an interactive discussion of "The Snow Man" led by KWH Faculty Director Al Filreis. All are welcome. Let it snow!

Friday, 1/21

Saturday, 1/22

Sunday, 1/23

Monday, 1/24

A talk by Denise Ferreira da Silva

"After It's All Said: Notes Toward a Material Aesthetics"

6:00 PM (ET) on YouTube

presented by: the Time Sensitive series
watch: on YouTube

Curated and hosted by Ethan Plaue and Rebecca N. Liu, Time Sensitive is a reading series that explores the time-making practices of poetry, performance, and multimedia art. Poets and artists may engage themes such as crisis time, ordinary time, affecting through time, micro and macro time, shared and unshared time, the materiality of time, decolonial time, and the new times of past, present, and future — in short, artworks that express a sensitivity to time.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of A Dívida Impagavel (OIP & Casa do Povo, 2019), Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles and essays have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. And her writings have been translated into several languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, and Danish. She is a member of the Sharjah Working Group that is drafting the Charter of the Rights of the Future Generations to be presented at an event parallel to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26), which opens later this month in Glasgow next month and of the Canadian Federal funding agency, Social Sciences and Humanities Council’s Advisory Committee to Address Anti-Black Racism.

Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), and Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum , in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and featured (essays and interviews) in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux.

Tuesday, 1/25

NEW POEMS FOR THE NEW YEAR

A reading by members of Suppose an Eyes

6:00 PM (ET) on YouTube

watch: on YouTube

Suppose An Eyes is a poetry workshop sponsored by the Kelly Writers House. It takes its name from a "portrait" in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. Suppose An Eyes has two main goals: to provide a supportive place for poets to share and improve their writing, and to organize readings where poets can present their work to the public. The group was founded in 1999 and is one of the longest running poetry workshops in the Philly area. We have a diverse membership with poets of all ages and from a variety of backgrounds.

Wednesday, 1/26

SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT

7:30 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube

EVENT POSTPONED

Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You'll have three minutes at the Kelly Writers House podium to share what you want!

Thursday, 1/27

ZINE WORKSHOP

Led by Matao Dreskin

6:00 PM (ET) – 8:00PM (ET) in the Ats Café

co-sponsored by: the KWH Zine Library and the Soapbox
RSVP required

EVENT POSTPONED

Learn all about zines, independent DIY publications, at this hands-on workshop with The Soapbox, a West Philadelphia-based community print shop and zine library. Soapbox artist Matao Dreskin will lead participants through zine making activities of all sorts. Dreskin's work in handmade paper, book, and print embraces and reconfigures the visual language of abstraction in addressing questions of nihilism, hope and civilization in the normalization of climate catastrophe in the epoch of the anthropocene.

Friday, 1/28

Saturday, 1/29

Sunday, 1/30

Monday, 1/31