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February 2012

Wednesday, 2/1

Recent works on paper by Amze Emmons

a Brodsky Gallery Opening

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

The Brodsky Gallery is an art gallery integrated with the ground floor of the Writers House. Up to six exhibitions take place during the academic year from September through May. Openings feature a reception for the artist and an accompanying program; examples include panel discussions, poetry readings, film screenings, and technique demonstrations by the artist. Through exhibiting a diverse array of art media and cross-disciplinary programming, the Brodsky Gallery at KWH seeks to engage Penn students and the broader Philadelphia community with the interrelationships between literary and visual arts. Thanks to the generosity of Michael and Heidi Brodsky, whose support makes our gallery space possible, the Brodsky Gallery is a permanent project of Kelly Writers House.

The first Brodsky Gallery exhibition of 2012 will feature drawings and prints by artist Amze Emmons. There will be an informal reception and casual conversation with the artist.

Amze Emmons (b. 1974, Amsterdam, NY) is a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking. Emmons received a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University and a MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He has held solo exhibitions at Space 1026, Philadelphia; OHT Gallery, Boston; and Works on Paper Gallery, Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including EFA Project Space and the International Print Center, New York; the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington; the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; and The Print Center, Philadelphia. Emmons has received numerous awards including a Fellowship in the Arts from the Independence Foundation; an Individual Creative Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Arts Council; and a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. His work has received critical attention in New American Paintings, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe,among other publications. He has taught at the University of Vermont and the University of Iowa and is currently an associate professor of art at Muhlenberg College. Emmons is also a co-founder and contributor of the popular art blog, Printeresting.org.


Thursday, 2/2

A conversation with Lou Reed

Blutt Singer Song Writer Symposium

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.

Lou Reed is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades. The Velvet Underground has gained a considerable cult following in the years since its demise and has gone on to become one of the most widely cited and influential bands of the era. As the Velvet Underground's principal songwriter, Reed wrote about subjects of personal experience that rarely had been examined so openly in rock and roll, including sexuality and drug culture. After his departure from the group, Reed began a solo career in 1971. He had a hit the following year with "Walk on the Wild Side", although he subsequently lacked the mainstream commercial success its chart status seemed to indicate. Reed's work as a solo artist frustrated critics wishing for a return of the Velvet Underground. In 1975 Reed released a double album of feedback loops, Metal Machine Music, upon which he later commented: "No one is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive." In 2008, Reed married performance artist Laurie Anderson.

Friday, 2/3

Saturday, 2/4

Sunday, 2/5

Monday, 2/6

A fiction reading by Adam Wilson

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Sam Apple

Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen, forthcoming from Harper Perennial in February 2012. His journalism, criticism, and fiction appear in many publications including The Paris Review, Bookforum, The New York Times, The Literary Review, The New York Observer, Meridian, Washington Square Review, The New York Tyrant, Gigantic, Time Out New York, The Forward, Paste, and the recent anthology, Promised Lands: New Jewish Fiction on Longing and Belonging. Wilson is an editor at The Faster Times and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.


Tuesday, 2/7

a poetry reading by Wayne Miller

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
introduced by: Greg Djanikian

Wayne Miller is the author of three collections of poems, The City, Our City (Milkweed Editions, 2011), The Book of Props (2009), and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006). He is also the translator of Moikom Zeqo's I Don't Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and a co-editor of both New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008; w/ Kevin Prufer) and Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master (Pleiades Press, 2011; w/ Takako Lento). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.


Wednesday, 2/8

Bernheimer Symposium: Pico Iyer

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: Creative Writing
introduced by: ArtsEdge Resident Rolf Potts

Pico Iyer is a travel-writer, essayist, and novelist born in England, raised in California, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. After teaching writing and literature at Harvard, he joined Time in 1982 as a writer on world affairs. Since then he has traveled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, and basing himself in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife. He writes on literature for The New York Review of Books; on globalism for Harper's; on travel for the Financial Times; and on many other themes for the New York Times, National Geographic, TLS, Conde Nast Traveler, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and Salon.com. His books include Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Cuba and the Night, Falling off the Map, Tropical Classical, and The Global Soul. In his latest, The Man Within My Head—out in January from Knopf—Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene, examining Greene's obsessions, his elusiveness, and his penchant for mystery.


Thursday, 2/9

Jewish Writers You Wish You Knew About

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Alexa Bryn
co-sponsored by: the Wexler Family series

CURF summer intern Alexa Bryn (C'13) invited seven people—students, faculty, and alumni—to discuss lesser known, but really great Jewish writers they want you to know more about. Each panelist will speak for seven minutes, which will include a short reading of their chosen writer's work. Join them after the event for a reception filled with Jewish foods they love and think you should try.

featuring:

Friday, 2/10

Saturday, 2/11

Sunday, 2/12

Monday, 2/13

A reading by Karen Finley

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: seating strictly limited; please rsvp to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.

Karen Finley's art transcends the obvious adjectives—"controversial," "provocative"—so often attached to it. She may be most well known for being one of four performance artists whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were vetoed in 1990 after condemnation by Senator Jesse Helms over "decency" issues. Despite an unsuccessful lawsuit by the "NEA Four," Finley was awarded a grant the following year.

Finley's story, then, is one of breaking down barriers. Her performance repertoire includes "We Keep Our Victims Ready" and "Shut Up and Love Me," in which she uses chocolate and honey and her own body to protest violence and explore issues of sexuality and love. She won an Obie Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1997's "The American Chestnut." In 2004, she wrote and co-performed a play, George and Martha, satirizing a hypothetical affair between George W. Bush and Martha Stewart. More recently, she has assumed the persona of Liza Minnelli to explore a post-9/11 New York in her cabaret performance "Make Love."

Finley's poem of exclusion, "Black Sheep," was cast in bronze and mounted on New York's Lower East Side, hailing the gays, women, AIDS-afflicted, immigrants and other outcasts it addresses. She created a memorial installation at the concentration camp at Gusen, Austria, to commemorate the murder of Jewish children by the Nazis. She has also written numerous books, including The Reality Shows (2011), a survey of her work of the previous decade.

While Finley's art may not be immediately accessible or translatable, Ben Brantley of The New York Times writes, "there's no denying the genuine rage and pain behind her performance, nor her ability to find voices that reflect those feelings in disturbingly visceral ways."


Tuesday, 2/14

A brunch conversation with Karen Finley

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

10:00 AM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: seating strictly limited; please rsvp to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.


Wednesday, 2/15

Whenever We Feel Like It presents

Norman Finkelstein and Brian Teare

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

This event will be steamed LIVE ONLINE via KWH-TV: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv.

The Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series has outposts in Philadelphia, PA and South Hadley, MA and is put on by Committee of Vigilance members Emily Pettit and Michelle Taransky. The Committee of Vigilance is a subdivision of Sleepy Lemur Quality Enterprises, which is the production division of The Meeteetzee Institute.

Norman Finkelstein teaches modern and contemporary American literature, Jewish American literature, literary theory, and creative writing. His books of poetry include Restless Messengers (University of Georgia Press, 1992), Passing Over (Marsh Hawk, 2007), Scribe (Dos Madres, 2009), and the three-volume serial poem Track (Spuyten Duyvil 1999, 2002, 2005). He has also published five books of literary criticism: The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry (Bucknell University Press, 1988; 2nd ed., 1993), The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature (SUNY Press, 1992), Not One of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (SUNY Press, 2001), Lyrical Interference: Essays on Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003) and On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred In Contemporary American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2010). Recent poems, essays and reviews have appeared such journals as LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Contemporary Literature, Cincinnati Review, Rain Taxi and Hambone.

A former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2013. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Thursday, 2/16

A conversation with Mathieu Copeland

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the Institute of Contemporary Art and CPCW
hosted by: Kenny Goldsmith

Mathieu Copeland has been developing a practice seeking to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and to renew our perceptions. As an independent curator he published Perfect Magazine in 2003—magazine printed in white on white, and he has curated, among many others, the exhibitions "Expat-Art Center/EAC", "Soundtrack for an Exhibition", "Alan Vega's retrospective", and initiated the touring "A Spoken Word Exhibition", In 2008, he curated "A Choreographed Exhibition" at the Kunsthalle in St Gall, Switzerland, and at the Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, France. In 2009, he co-curated the exhibition "VOIDS, A Retrospective" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Kunsthalle in Bern. He is also the co-editor of the catalogue Vides/Voids. And in the summer of 2010, he curated "Before there was nothing, after we can only do better" at Circuit, Lausanne, and "Une Exposition (du) Sensible (an exhibition of the sensitive)" at the Synagogue de Delme. Forthcoming exhibition include "A Choreographed Polyphony," for HEAD - Geneva. He also releases a collection of artists' films on DVD.

Friday, 2/17

Saturday, 2/18

Sunday, 2/19

Monday, 2/20

A lunch talk with Allison Steele

Povich Journalism Program

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Dick Polman

Allison Steele, a Philadelphia native, began her journalism career at the Concord Monitor in Concord, New Hampshire, where she covered everything from barn fires and Red Sox fans to the 2002 Presidential Primary. She won several state and regional awards for a two-part series about death and grieving, and also served as Arts and Entertainment editor before leaving in 2007. A yearlong stint covering local issues in central New Jersey at the Newark Star-Ledger led to a job at her hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she has been since 2008. Since 2009 she has been one of two reporters covering crime and the Philadelphia Police department, which includes writing about crime-fighting strategies, police corruption and the drug trade. One of her favorite recent stories offered a step-by-step look at how homicide detectives solved a complicated double shooting in the hours and days after the crime.

LIVE AT THE WRITERS HOUSE

with musical guest The Old-Fashioneds

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the Kelly Writers House and WXPN FM (88.5). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc. For more information, contact Producer Erin Gautsche (gautsche@writing.upenn.edu).


Sam Allingham
Bridget Talone
Patty Russo
Tim Leonido
Matthew Jakubowski

A Philadelphia area native, Patty Russo started writing while working amidst microscopes and lab animals in a cancer research lab, ultimately receiving her MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work focuses primarily on short-form and semi-experimental fiction. Her stories tend to sit on the ledge of plausibility; impossible situations rendered not only possible, but also familiar. Patty now works for an oncology journal and teaches science writing. She is finishing a collection of short fiction.

Timothy Leonido lives in Philadelphia. He studies at Temple University and runs an online audio journal called Foxed & Grimed.

Matthew Jakubowski's fiction was published most recently online by Barrelhouse. His non-fiction is forthcoming in The Believer and The Quarterly Conversation. He writes regularly for print and online venues such as Bookforum, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Philadelphia's City Paper, The Rumpus, and BOMB. He has written two novels and helps judge the fiction category for the Best Translated Book Award, given by Three Percent at the University of Rochester. He lives in West Philly with his wife and son.

The Old-Fashioneds is a three-woman project based out of West Philadelphia. They began singing together outside a bar late one night and haven't stopped since! Driven by tight three-part harmonies and a strong rhythmic pulse, they draw their repertoire from old-time fiddle tunes, bluegrass standards, and early country music. Regardless of genre, their interpretation is heartfelt and faithful to traditional styles. They have played at places like the 9:30 club in D.C., The Fire and other local venues in Philadelphia, as well as a regular gig at the neighborhood bar.


Tuesday, 2/21

Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

A panel discussion with translator Mark Harman and Penn professors Jean-Michel Rabaté and Eric Jarosinski

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Widely regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth-century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a now classic book of advice about life, which was was inspired by a letter from a budding young poet. In the letters Rilke speaks about love, sexuality, nature, religion, and the importance of solitude. The book is addressed especially to young people with creative aspirations.

After a short reading from the letters, the three panelists, Mark Harman, Jean-Michel Rabaté and Eric Jarosinski will explore these paradoxical ideas about creativity, unrequited love and personal growth as well as possible connections between Rilke's advice about relationships and his often fraught love life.

Mark Harman's translation of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle won the Modern Language Association's Lois Roth Award, and his rendering of Kafka's first novel Amerika: The Missing Person (2008) was well-received. Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College, he has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature. His new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was published in 2011 by Harvard University Press. Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote that "this fresh translation reminds us anew that. . . (Rilke's) advice is not only about how to write poems but how to live a deliberate, meaningful life."

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992 is the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities. One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org), he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the president of the American Samuel Beckett Studies association. Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books include Lacan Literario, Siglo 21 (2007), 1913: The cradle of modernism (2007), and The Ethic of the Lie (2008), and Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (2010). The Ghosts of Modernity has been republished in 2010. Currently, he is completing a book on Beckett and editing an anthology on modernism and literary theory, forthcoming in 2012.

Eric Jarosinski is an Assistant Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, where his teaching and research focus primarily on Weimar-era literature, culture, and philosophy. He is the co-editor, with Mena Mitrano, of The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory, and is currently completing a book manuscript, Cellophane Modernity: Berlin Reflections of Weimar Transparency.


Wednesday, 2/22

SPEAKEASY: POETRY, PROSE, AND ANYTHING GOES!

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Our Speakeasy Open Mic Night is held once a month. We invite writers to share their work, or the work of others, in our Arts Cafe. Speakeasy welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, your award-winning essay, or your stand up comedy to share. You should expect outrageous (and free!) raffles for things you didn't know you needed, occasional costumes, and, of course, community members who love writing.

Thursday, 2/23

7-UP on Isolation

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Seven people speak for seven minutes each about "isolation" in its various forms, featuring: David Barnes on the Lazaretto quarantine station, Anthony DeCurtis on "Isolation" by John Lennon or Joy Division (or both), Al Filreis on Emily Dickinson, Jill Ivey on working from home, Aaron Marcus on criminality, Peter Schwarz on isolation politics, and Callie Ward on geographic isolations. Following the presentations will be an isolation-themed reception (foods that are somehow isolated or isolating – TV trays? big plates with small foods? lots of packaging? heavy on the garlic? Suggestions welcome).


Friday, 2/24

Saturday, 2/25

Sunday, 2/26

Monday, 2/27

A MEETING OF THE WRITERS HOUSE PLANNING COMMITTEE (THE "HUB")

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

RSVP: email jalowent@writing.upenn.edu

From the time of its founding in 1995-1996, the Kelly Writers House has been run more or less collectively by members of its community. Our original team of intrepid founders—the group of students, faculty, alumni, and staff who wanted to create an independent haven for writers and supporters of contemporary writing in any genre—took for themselves the name "the hub." "Hub" was the generic term given by Penn's Provost, President, and other planners who hoped that something very innovative would be done at 3805 Locust Walk to prove the viability of the idea that students, working with others, could create an extracurricular learning community around common intellectual and creative passions. To this day, the Writers House Planning Committee refers to itself as "the hub"—the core of engaged faculty, student, staff, and alumni volunteers from whom the House's creative energy and vitality radiates.

New and old Hub members alike are welcome to join us for pizza and a discussion of upcoming readings and programs, volunteer opportunities, and updates from project leaders. Anyone is welcome to join the Writers House Planning Committee. At this first meeting of the year we will discuss ways you can get involved at Writers House.

Tuesday, 2/28


Wednesday, 2/29

A Celebration of 3808: A Journal of Critical Writing

co-sponsored by: the Critical Writing Program

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

Each semester, instructors teaching Critical Writing seminars across a wide range of disciplines at the University of Pennsylvania nominate the best essay written by an undergraduate in their class. A faculty editorial board selects essays from among the nominees to publish in 3808: A Journal of Critical Writing. A student editorial board selects the best essay in the collection as the winner of the Henry LaBarre Jayne Essay Prize.