February 2021
Monday, 2/1
Tuesday, 2/2
A conversation with Mirin Fader
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
hosted by: Jamie-Lee Josselyn
Mirin Fader is a Staff Writer for the Ringer. She wrote for Bleacher Report from 2017–20. She's written for the Orange County Register, espnW.com, SI.com, and Slam. She writes about sports but she really writes about people. Her work has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, the Football Writers Association of America, the Los Angeles Press Club and the Best American Sports Writing series.
Wednesday, 2/3
Words Without Borders: Young Russophone Writers
12:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
Current literature in Russian defies stereotypes of venerated men writing heavy novels. This event features young Russian-language authors whose roots across Eurasia have led them to break new ground in protest poetry, flash fiction, noir, and more. The February issue of Words Without Borders will center this booming literary generation. Join us for readings from the issue by translators and writers followed by a discussion panel and audience Q&A. Readers will include Alisa Ganieva, Danyil Zadorozhnyi, Sabrina Jaszi, Isaac Wheeler, Elina Alter, and Katherine Young. Commentators will include Olga Breininger as well as issue editors Josephine von Zitzewitz and Hilah Kohen. This event will be hosted by Words Without Borders Editorial Director Susan Harris.
Thursday, 2/4
The Nib: A Panel Discussion
Applebaum Editors and Publishers Program
6:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
Matt Bors is a cartoonist and editor who founded The Nib in 2013. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Daily Kos and many other outlets. He was a two time 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his political cartoons, which were recently collected in the book We Should Improve Society Somewhat.
Whit Taylor is a cartoonist, writer, and educator from New Jersey. She is a contributing editor to The Nib.
Mattie Lubchansky is the Associate Editor of The Nib and a cartoonist and illustrator living in Queens, NY. Their work has appeared in New York Magazine, VICE, Eater, Mad Magazine, Gothamist, The Toast, The Hairpin, Brooklyn Magazine, and their long-running webcomic Please Listen to Me. They are the co-author of Dad Magazine (Quirk, 2016).
Eleri Harris is a cartoonist, journalist and Features Editor at The Nib. Her cartoons have also been published online and in print by The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Cuepoint, re:form, Symbolia, Narrative.ly, Taddle Creek, Grapple Annual, and Seven Days. Her Nib comic serial Reported Missing was shortlisted for the 2018 Center for Cartoon Studies & Slate Book Review Cartoonist Studio Prize and won Gold at the 2018 Ledger Awards in Australia.
Friday, 2/5
Saturday, 2/6
Sunday, 2/7
Monday, 2/8
Hub meeting
5:00 PM (ET) on Zoom
RSVP: wh@writing.upenn.edu
register: here
The Kelly Writers House is run collectively by members of its community. The Writers House Planning Committee – also known as "the Hub"— meets monthly to discuss Writers House projects and programs. Join us at this first meeting of the year to find out about some of the things we will work on this year and to find out how you can get involved with community-led events and projects. This meeting will take place on Zoom. Please register by email to jalowent@writing.upenn.edu
Tuesday, 2/9
The Good Poem Project
Junior Fellows Prize
7:00 PM on YouTube
Supported by the Kelly Writers House Junior Fellows Prize, the Good Poem Project is a collaborative experiment exploring how we assign value to poems. Sure, we know that poetry is subjective, but for both casual readers and dedicated writers alike, many other factors play a role in how we establish what makes a poem "good." For example: how do poets reconcile the role of prizes and prestige in their career advancement and financial stability while maintaining a healthy relationship with their own artistry? How do race, class, gender, and ability affect who has access to reading and writing poetry? How can we make poetry more accessible and enjoyable to all readers? To celebrate the project's launch, Junior Fellow Amanda Silberling welcomes seven poets to share what they think makes a poem good. Visit goodpoemproject.com to learn more about the project and submit your own response to the following question: what is a good poem?
Maya Arthur is a writer and novice archivist/artist/researcher. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English & Creative Writing in 2018. She loves gardening in her cradle graves at the Woodlands cemetery, making and reading zines, discussing witches at length, and eating as much Fu Wah banh mi as she can. Her poetry right now focuses on memory, nostalgia, and self encountering. She was a 2019 Lambda Poetry Fellow and 2020 Aspen Words fellow. You can find her wandering around West Philly.
Imani Davis is a queer Black writer from Brooklyn. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and Urban Word NYC alumnus, they earned fellowships from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Lambda Literary Foundation, BOAAT Press, and the Stadler Center for Poetry. Imani’s work has appeared with Best New Poets 2020, PBS News Hour’s Brief But Spectacular Series, The Offing, The Adroit Journal, Best of the Net, Shade Literary Arts, The Rumpus, TEDx, and elsewhere. They completed their B.A. summa cum laude in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and are currently pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard.
Izzy Lopez is a writer and artist whose work seeks to uncover the extraordinary in everyday experience. Izzy writes memoir and personal essays and is interested in family, coming of age, and memory. Her work has appeared in Penn Appétit, The Red Cedar Review, r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal, F-Word Magazine, and The Penn Review. Izzy received a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and she currently lives in South Philadelphia with her boyfriend and cat.
Dan McKeon is a poet, barista and web developer living in Philly. They are the editor and programmer of Pretty Cool Poetry Thing and have appeared in Peach Mag, Foundlings and Vagabond City. They enjoy coffee, socialism, and blaseball.
Erin Jin Mei O'Malley is a queer Asian American writer. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, wildness, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. They have received a scholarship from the Lambda Literary Foundation and nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can follow them @ebxydreambxy
Mingo Reynolds is the Director of Administration for CPCW and Director of the RealArts@Penn Program. She has been taking classes at Penn since 2005, her goal is to graduate and retire on the same day in many years. In a poetry seminar she learned that the word Nantucket was not necessarily in every poem and she enjoyed frightening her professor by threatening to only write poetry about her cats.
Amy Saul-Zerby is the author of two poetry collections, Paper Flowers Imaginary Birds (Be About It Press, 2017) and Deep Camouflage (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Chicago Review of Books, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Voicemail Poems and Literary Philly.
Amanda Silberling is writer and artist with work in Hyperallergic, NPR, Business Insider, the Kenyon Review, and other places. As a Kelly Writers House Junior Fellow, she is developing the Good Poem Project, a collaborative poetry experiment and resource. According to Jamie-Lee Josselyn, she is also the Chief Meme Officer of the Kelly Writers House. Find her on Twitter at @asilbwrites or on her website.
Wednesday, 2/10
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
7:30 PM (ET) on Zoom and YouTube
register: here
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You'll have three minutes on Zoom to read, sing, or perform (poetry, prose, music, stand-up: it's up to you!). Registration for the event will open soon!
Thursday, 2/11
Existing In-Between: Spatial Precarity in Literature and Art
1:30 PM (ET) – 4:30 PM (ET) on Zoom
Co-sponsored by: The Office of the Provost Excellence though Diversity Fund, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The Middle East Center, and The Weitzman School of Design
register: here
The series “Transdisciplinary Urbanism in Times of Precarity” emphasizes that times of crisis and precarity produce challenges to urban space, processes, and infrastructure that mirror and often heighten changing realities. Impasses in urban processes and services does not impact everyone equally, and are often contingent on existing social and economic inequities, as well as intersecting frameworks of marginalization. The series brings together distinguished artists, poets, activists, policymakers, and art humanists to campus, and engage in conversations around precarity and urbanism and outstanding proposals to remedy and address them. "Existing-in Between: Spatial Precarity in Literature and Art,” as part of the “Transdisciplinary Urbanism in Times of Precarity” series, will reflect on such challenges from architectural, literary and artistic viewpoints with specific reference to the Persianate world.
Panelists:
Fatemeh Shams (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania) Mikhal Dekel (City College, New York) Salar Abdoh (City College, New York) Pamela Karimi (University of Massachusetts) Reza Mohammadi (Poet, Afghanistan) Abdul Manan Bhat (PhD candidate and poet, Religious Studies Department, University of Pennsylvania) Illya Mousavijad (MFA candidate and animation artist, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania)
Friday, 2/12
Saturday, 2/13
Sunday, 2/14
Monday, 2/15
Instant Literature
7:00 PM (ET) via Zoom
hosted by: Mahailya Hinsey (C'23)
register: here
Join us for an evening of collaborative storytelling. We'll work together to ad-lib narratives – or almost-narratives – built on audience suggestions, teamwork, and a lot of jokes. Anyone who is interested can participate.
Tuesday, 2/16
Wednesday, 2/17
A reading by Jenny Zhang
6:00 PM (ET) via Zoom
Co-sponsored by: The Asian American Studies Program, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation
Introduced by: Jo Park
register: here
Jenny Zhang is the author of the story collection, Sour Heart, and the poetry collection, My Baby First Birthday. She’s currently adapting Sour Heart into a feature-length film for A24.
Thursday, 2/18
Recycling your words: A Zine Workshop
led by Nia Hampton
6:00 PM ET on Zoom
register: here
sponsored by: KWH Zine Library and Creative Ventures
Nia Hampton is an artist, educator, organizer, and most importantly a West Baltimore native. Her self published zine “Cicatrizes” was featured in AfroPunk.com. Her cultural reviews and features about the global black experience have been featured in Vice.com, VillageVoice.com, City Paper, Dazed Digital.com, Genius.com, and Paste Magazine.com. Her creative non-fiction has been featured in True Laurels, Griots Republic.com, The Coalition Zine and Hysteria Zine. Her poetry has been featured in GlitterMOBMag.com.
Friday, 2/19
Saturday, 2/20
Sunday, 2/21
Monday, 2/22
A Reading by Erica Hunt
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30PM (ET) on YouTube
NOTE: An RSVP is not required to attend this virtual event, however if you’d like to receive a reminder and a direct link e-mailed to you on the day of the program, please write to Fellows Program Coordinator Lily Applebaum at whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and her newest work Jump The Clock: New and Selected Poems out with Nightboat Books in October 2020. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, Hambone, and In The American Tree, among other publications. Essays on poetics, feminism and politics have been collected in Moving Borders, Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of the anthology Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing from Kore Press. Hunt graduated with a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University in 1980 and an M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2013. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Djerassi Foundation, and is a past fellow of Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy and a past Fellow at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing in Poetics and Poetic Practice here at Penn. Currently, Hunt is Bonderman Visiting Professor at Brown University and a Poet in Residence at Temple University.
Tuesday, 2/23
A Conversation with Erica Hunt
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
11:00AM (ET) on YouTube
NOTE: An RSVP is not required to attend this virtual event, however if you’d like to receive a reminder and a direct link e-mailed to you on the day of the program, please write to Fellows Program Coordinator Lily Applebaum at whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and her newest work Jump The Clock: New and Selected Poems out with Nightboat Books in October 2020. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, Hambone, and In The American Tree, among other publications. Essays on poetics, feminism and politics have been collected in Moving Borders, Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of the anthology Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing from Kore Press. Hunt graduated with a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University in 1980 and an M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2013. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Djerassi Foundation, and is a past fellow of Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy and a past Fellow at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing in Poetics and Poetic Practice here at Penn. Currently, Hunt is Bonderman Visiting Professor at Brown University and a Poet in Residence at Temple University.
Wednesday, 2/24
Grab Bag Brodsky Gallery Opening: Art By Mail
6:00 PM (ET) via YouTube
Organized by Leah Baxter, Alyson del Pino, and Quinn Gruber
Last month we sent out mystery kits of art supplies to community members who wanted to make things! Join us tonight to see some of the work they made — drawing, knitting, sculpture and more — and an informal conversation about art by mail.
Thursday, 2/25
Janis Joplin: Her Life and Music
A discussion with Holly George-Warren
5:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
Hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
Sponsored by: Creative Ventures
watch: here
Janis Joplin has long been renowned as one of the most extraordinary voices in the history of rock & roll. In her biography, Janis: Her Life and Music, Holly George-Warren fully reveals the woman who unleashed that voice. She presents a riveting, three-dimensional portrait of Joplin that uncovers and gives full due to her talents as a songwriter, producer and band leader. In an event hosted by Anthony DeCurtis, George-Warren will discuss and read from her book, which has recast one of the most loved and highly regarded figures in all of popular music.
Holly George-Warren is a two-time Grammy Award nominee and the award-winning author of sixteen books, including the New York Times bestseller The Road to Woodstock (with Michael Lang). In addition to Janis, she has written biographies of Alex Chilton and Gene Autry. She has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. George-Warren serves on the nominating committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and teaches at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and son.