February 2016
Monday, 2/1
College Newspaper Editors Panel
Applebaum Editors and Publishers program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
Journalist and creative writing faculty member Dick Polman will moderate a panel discussion of campus journalism, featuring Lauren Feiner of The Daily Pennsylvanian (University of Pennsylvania), Anna Mazarakis of The Daily Princetonian (Princeton), Justin Roczniak of The Triangle (Drexel), and Shannon Sweeney of The Daily Collegian (Penn State). How do student-run newspapers operate? What are the special responsibilities of an indecently run paper that is also part of a college community? Do student journalists face unique challenges or opportunities in their coverage of news? Join us for an open-ended discuss of these and other issues.
Lunch with Karen Heller
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
Karen Heller is national general features writer for The Washington Post's Style section. She was previously a metro columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she also reported on popular culture, politics and social issues. She has won awards for investigative reporting, feature writing and criticism and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary.
Tuesday, 2/2
Wednesday, 2/3
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
7:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
Our student-run open mic night 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.
Thursday, 2/4
PoemTalk: 100th Episode
Hosted by Al Filreis
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV: part 1, part 2
Al Filreis, long-time host and producer of PoemTalk, a podcast series co-sponsored by Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation, brings together seven poets who have participated in PoemTalk over the years: Charles Bernstein, Herman Beavers, Maria Damon, Billy Joe Harris, Tracie Morris, Erica Kaufman, and Steve McLaughlin. This lively, informal discussion will itself be recorded as the 100th episode of the series. Each poet will choose a previous episode, play a clip from it, and then offer a further elaboration of the original close reading.
Friday, 2/5
Saturday, 2/6
Sunday, 2/7
Monday, 2/8
Hub Meeting
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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.
Tuesday, 2/9
Margaret Christakos: a poetry reading
A Creative Writing Program reading
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event
listen to an audio recording of this event
A walker in the field of letters, Canadian writer Margaret Christakos has published nine collections of poetry, including Multitudes (Coach House, 2013), Welling (Scrivener, 2010, a Globe 100 book), Sooner (Coach House, 2005, a Lowther nominee) and Excessive Love Prostheses (Coach House, 2002, ReLit winner), as well as a novel, Charisma (Pedlar, 2000, a Trillium nominee). In association with University of Toronto, she designed and facilitated Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon from 2006 to 2012. She was Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004-05, and in 2012-13 received a major Chalmers Arts Fellowship. Her poetic practice explores sequence, excess, oration, the body, mothering, relationship, attachment, longing, lament, public speech and social hope. In spring 2016 she will publish Her Paraphernalia: Tumult/Études on Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies with Book Thug. She lives in Toronto.
Wednesday, 2/10
Whenever We Feel Like It
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event
listen to an audio recording of this event
The Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series is put on by Committee of Vigilance members Michelle Taransky and Emily Pettit. The Committee of Vigilance is a subdivision of Sleepy Lemur Quality Enterprises, which is the production division of The Meeteetzee Institute.
Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the novel Paulina & Fran, the poetry collection MOODS, and the fiction collection Pee On Water. She lives in Northampton, MA.
Kenna O’Rourke is the managing editor of Jacket2, an online poetics journal run from the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in The Pocket Guide, the Philos Adelphos Irrealis chapbook, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as a handful of undergraduate publications from her time at Penn.
Mark Leidner is the author of two books of poetry, Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press, 2011) and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press, 2011). He teaches at the University of the Arts.
Thursday, 2/11
Lunch Talk with Cast Members from Filter Theater's Twelfth Night
Dan Poole & Sandy Foster
Moderated by Jackie Goldfinger
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
listen to an audio recording of this event
Actors Dan Poole and Sandy Foster join playwright Jackie Goldfinger for a discussion of Filter Theatre's explosive new take oon Shakespeare's lyrical Twelfth Night. The production pairs classical verse with a riotous interpretation in a radically-cut and fast-paced story of romance, satire, and mistaken identity.
Boundaries, Therapy, and the Writing Cure: The case of Anne Sexton
Dawn Skorczewski and Kathleen Ross
Moderated by Elaine Zickler
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
co-sponsored by: Creative Ventures and the Psychoanalytic Center of Pennsylvania
Dawn Skorczewski is Professor of English and Director of University Writing at Brandeis University. An affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, she has conducted workshops for psychoanalytic educators across the US and in Europe and South America. Her articles on psychoanalytic education have been published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Quarterly and The American Psychoanalyst. She is the Chair of the Silberger Committee at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association's Artist/Scholar in Residence Committee. Her work on Anne Sexton's therapy tapes was published by Routledge in 2012.
Kathleen Ross is a faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, where she teaches candidates and serves as chair of the Curriculum Committee of the Adult Psychoanalytic program. She is in private practice in Center City and is also a clinician on the staff of the Therapy Center of Philadelphia, formerly the Women's Therapy Center. Prior to becoming a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, Kathleen had a long career in academia, most recently as Professor of Spanish at New York University, a position she left in 2009. In her academic life she specialized in the fields of Colonial Latin America and Translation, and as a Visiting Scholar has taught Translation Theory and Practice at Penn to graduate students in Romance Languages. She has published numerous translations of narrative and poetry from Spanish, including Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (Univ of California Press, 2004), and Jesus Diaz' The Initials of the Earth (Duke UP, 2006).
Elaine Zickler is a psychoanalyst in a private practice in Moorestown, NJ and is on the faculty at PCOP.
Friday, 2/12
Saturday, 2/13
Sunday, 2/14
Monday, 2/15
Samuel Delany
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 573-9749
watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Writer, literary critic and professor Samuel Delany was born and raised in Harlem, New York City and first rose to prominence in the mid 1960s with his experimental and genre-deviating science fiction novels and short stories including the Nebula award winning Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967), and what many consider to be his master work in this genre, Dhalgren (1975). His fiction is critically acclaimed for experimenting wildly with form, structure and perspective, and for visiting and revisiting themes of language, knowledge, societal norms, sexuality and that which society considers sexually taboo and pornographic. Delany is also well known and highly regarded for his critical writings on race, science fiction, and gender, as well as his brilliant memoirs including Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) and the Hugo Award-winning The Motion of Light in Water (1988). Delany has been a professor at many prominent institutions, most notably from 2001 through his retirement in 2015 at Temple University's MFA program.
Tuesday, 2/16
brunch with Samuel Delany
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 573-9749
watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Wednesday, 2/17
A Lunch Talk with Paul Waldman
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Hosted by: Dick Polman
rsvp required: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
Paul Waldman writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success. He is also a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect.
Sensible Nonsense
Creative Ventures Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
Join us for a celebration of The Sensible Nonsense Project, edited by Arielle Brousse, and help us honor the humor, pathos, and enduring wisdom of children's books! Six speakers will share stories about their own favorite childhood books, what those books taught them, and how those lessons continue to influence their adult lives. Stay on after the readings for a delicious reception inspired by after-school snacks, and to get more information about how you, too, can participate in the project. In the meantime, visit The Sensible Nonsense Project at sensiblenonsense.us.
Thursday, 2/18
Sonic Poetry
Andrew Whiteman and Adrienne Amato
Creative Ventures Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Sonic Poetry is a mash up of images, beats, and samples of poets who work outside mainstream verse culture. Tonight's program is "poetry as social investigation." Joing us as musician Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA) and collaborator Adrienne Amato do some poetry / visual improv using the SP404 and some cracked software.
Friday, 2/19
Saturday, 2/20
Sunday, 2/21
Monday, 2/22
A conversation with Scott Neustadter
Hartman Screenwriting Symposium
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Screenwriter and producer Scott Neustadter writes screenplays in collaboration with his writing partner Michael H. Weber. The pair have collaborated since 1999 when Scott hired Michael for an internship at New York's Tribeca Productions. They have proven themselves to be some of Hollywood’s most versatile and sought-after writers with their witty, fresh and intelligent storytelling. Neustadter and Weber together wrote the hit Fox Searchlight comedy/drama (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The film was nominated for "Best Feature - Comedy" at the Golden Globe Award and earned them an Independent Spirit Award and a Golden Satellite Award for Best Screenplay of the Year. Their follow-up, The Spectacular Now, starring Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller, and directed by James Ponsoldt, also garnered them a nomination for Best Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards. From there, they went on to adapt The Fault in Our Stars, based on the bestselling novel by John Green. It opened as the number one movie in America and has since grossed over $300 million dollars worldwide. This year saw the release of a second John Green adaptation Paper Towns, starring Nat Wolff and directed by Jake Schreier. Neustadter and Weber are currently working on several high profile film projects including The Disaster Artist, currently filming with an all-star cast including James and Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Sharon Stone, Bryan Cranston, Zac Efron, Jason Mitchell, Bob Oedenkirk and more; Rules of Civility, an adaptation of Amor Towles' critically acclaimed novel; Where’d You Go, Bernadette, based on Maria Semple's bestselling novel; John Green's debut novel Looking for Alaska; and Rosaline, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as told through the perspective of Romeo's ex.
Tuesday, 2/23
Lunch with novelist Michelle Adelman
Hosted by Jamie-Lee Josselyn
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Michelle Adelman has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, and BS and MS degrees in Journalism from Northwestern University. She has worked as a magazine writer and editor, a university instructor, and a high school English teacher and dean. She grew up in Connecticut and has lived in New York, San Diego, and the Bay Area, where she currently resides. Piece of Mind is her first novel.
Elizabeth Willis: a poetry reading
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015). Her other books of poetry include Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England / L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003);The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place(University of Iowa Press, 2008). A recent Guggenheim fellow, she has held residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille, and has been a visiting poet at University of Denver, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1998-2002 she was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Mills College. Since 2002 she has taught at Wesleyan University, where she is Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.
Wednesday, 2/24
City Planning Poetics 1: What is a Map? What Can a Map Do?
Jena Osman and Amy Hillier in conversation
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Davy Knittle
watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event at PennSound
City Planning Poetics is a semesterly series that invites one or more poets and one or more planners, designers, planning historians or others working in the field of city planning to discuss a particular topic central to their work, to ask each other questions, and to read from their current projects.
Jena Osman's books of poems include Corporate Relations (Burning Deck, 2014), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She is a Professor of English at Temple University, where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program. She founded and edited the literary magazine Chain with Juliana Spahr for twelve years, which is currently archived in the ReIssues section of the online journal Jacket2 ; Osman and Spahr now edit the occasional book series ChainLinks together.
Amy Hillier has been at Penn since 1995 when she came to complete her MSW and PhD in social welfare. Her dissertation on historical mortgage redlining made extensive use of GIS mapping and eventually led to a faculty position at the School of Design. She currently teaches GIS courses in city planning, urban studies, and social work. Her research has focused on spatial health disparities including access to healthful foods and exposure to outdoor advertising. Currently she is engaged in a collaborative effort to extend academic and field training opportunities for graduate social work, education, and nursing students relating to social, educational, and health services for LGBTQ youth, particularly trans youth of color. She lives in West Philadelphia with her husband and two young children.
Thursday, 2/25
RealArts at Penn Presents: Ada Calhoun
hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen to an audio recording of this event
Ada Calhoun has been a journalist and critic for the past 18 years. She has worked as a crime reporter for the New York Post, a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a theatre critic for New York magazine, and a ghost writer or co-author of seven books for major publishers, including four best-sellers. Her most recent book is St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by Kirkus, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and the Village Voice.
Friday, 2/26
Saturday, 2/27
Sunday, 2/28
Monday, 2/29
Live at the Writers House
One Book, One Philadelphia: Cold Mountain
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
listen: to an audio recording of this event
LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration of the people of the Kelly Writers House and of WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, the Writers House airs a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest -- from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. "LIVE" is broadcast on WXPN. "LIVE" is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc and is produced by Alli Katz.
This month's LIVE will focus on Cold Mountain, the city-wide One Book, One Philadelphia title. The goal of One Book, One Philadelphia is to promote reading, literacy, and libraries, and to encourage the entire greater Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing a single book.