March 2022

Tuesday, 3/1

A reading by Alice McDermott

Friedman Fiction Program

6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube

REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube

Alice McDermott has published eight novels and an essay collection, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Award and The 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. In 2018 it was awarded France's Prix Femina for a work in translation. Her seventh novel, Someone, 2013, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Harpers, Commonwealth, and elsewhere. For more than two decades she was the Richard A Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.


Wednesday, 3/2

Thursday, 3/3

Friday, 3/4

Saturday, 3/5

Sunday, 3/6

Monday, 3/7

Tuesday, 3/8

Wednesday, 3/9

Thursday, 3/10

Friday, 3/11

Saturday, 3/12

Sunday, 3/13

Monday, 3/14

A conversation with Anna Orso

Povich Journalism Program

12:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube

hosted by: Dick Polman
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here

Anna Orso is a news reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer whose coverage of public safety is largely focused on gun violence and crime victims. She first joined The Inquirer's staff as a news features reporter in 2017. She spent two years as a breaking news reporter, covering major stories including the pandemic and the racial justice movement. Anna got her start in Philadelphia journalism in 2014 as a reporter at BillyPenn.com. She holds a journalism degree from Penn State and is from York, Pa.

A meeting of the writers house planning committee

5:00 PM in the Writers House Garden

REGISTER HERE to attend in person

Join us for a meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (also known as "the Hub") — the core group of engaged students, staff, faculty, and volunteers who help make things happen at Writers House. Anyone is welcome to become a Hub member by participating in Hub activities and helping out. Members of the Hub plan programs, share ideas, and discuss upcoming projects.


Tuesday, 3/15

Julia Bloch, Maxe Crandall, and Larissa Lai

A Poetry Reading

6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube

Hosted by: Al Filreis
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. Her most recent book of poetry is The Sacramento of Desire. She is the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and she directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory The Nancy Reagan Collection made the New York Public Library's Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub's 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart and Together Men Make Paradigms, and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture which most recently materialized as a poets theater series at The Stud in San Francisco. Maxe is Associate Director of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

Larissa Lai is the author of The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, Iron Goddess of Mercy, and five other books. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and finalist for seven more, she holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing there.

Wednesday, 3/16

Black Radical Comics by Ben Passmore

Hosted by Heidi Kalloo

A conversation with the artist

Brodsky Gallery Opening

6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube

REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube

Ben Passmore's work contains cold takes on politics, riots, anarchism, police brutality, history, sports, and identity. He's appeared in the New York Times, Believer magazine, and LAAB magazine, as well as frequent contributions to The Nib. His book, Sports Is Hell, won the 2021 Eisner award for Best Single Issue. His latest graphic novel following the lives of seven armed Black revolutionaries, These Black Arms To Hold You Up, drops in 2022.


Thursday, 3/17

Diasporic Poetics

Tim Yu in conversation with Jo Park and Al Filreis

12:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube

REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube

Tim Yu's new book Diasporic Poetics examines English-language poets of Asian descent working around the Pacific Rim — in the United States, Canada, the Philippines, and Australia. Yu argues that these poets have developed a distinctive poetics that exceeds our current paradigms of race, nation, and diaspora.

Timothy Yu is Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (Oxford University Press) and of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is also the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press), the Editor's Selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press), and he also serves as executive editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.

Josephine Park is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008) and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford 2016). She is the co-editor of Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury 2016), with Paul Stasi, and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930-1965 (Cambridge 2021), with Victor Bascara. She has served on the editorial boards of American Literature, The Journal of Asian American Studies, PMLA, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

Al Filreis is Kelly Family Professor of English, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-director of PennSound, and founder and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (2021), Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (1994) and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–60 (2008), and he is the host of the podcast PoemTalk.

Friday, 3/18

Saturday, 3/19

Sunday, 3/20

Monday, 3/21

LIVE at the Writers House

Class of 2022 showcase

6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café

Produced and hosted by Zach Carduner
REGISTER HERE to attend in person

This special taping of "LIVE at the Kelly Writers House” will feature six writers from Penn's Class of 2022 — Jamie Albrecht, Jessica Bao, Mehek Boparai, Rowana Miller, Erinda Sheno, and Chelsey Zhu — with musical guest Grant Pavol. "LIVE at the Writers House" is a long-standing collaboration between Kelly Writers House and WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, the Writers House records a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, for broadcast on WXPN. "LIVE" is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc.

Jamie Albrecht is an undergraduate studying Poetry and Poetics. When he's not on a Plants vs. Zombies spiral, he works as a proofreader and contributor (in theory) for Jacket2. He hopes to do something.

Jessica Bao is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and Creative Writing with a minor in Classical Studies. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The F-Word, Penn's feminist literary magazine, and has been a part of its Editorial Board since freshman year. She is a recipient of the Nancy Rafetto Leach Sweeten Prize for Best Undergraduate Essay on American Literature, First Place at the Benjamin Levy Award for Reviewing, and First Place at the Phi Kappa Sigma Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in The F-Word, 34th Street Magazine, and Up North Lit. She is from Shanghai, China and Rochester, Michigan. She loves her cat and dog very much, and her cat likes to sit on paper and books.

Mehek Boparai is a current senior at Penn English, concentrating in Creative Writing. She is working on her debut novella for the Honors Thesis program, "The Drag." She loves modernist literature, obscure trivia, and looking at espresso machines online to buy when she moves to San Francisco next year.

Rowana Miller likes to write stories about goblins, cryptic messages, cats, 24-hour diners, ghosts, and/or mind games. You can find her work in the Penn Review, plain china, and Slate Magazine. She's also the Founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a nonprofit that provides high-quality, accessible creative writing education to K–12 children across the United States.

Erinda Sheno is a senior from Northeast Philadelphia studying English and Creative Writing. She is currently working on her honors thesis, a family memoir centered on her parents' immigration to Philadelphia from Albania.

Chelsey Zhu is a student journalist, podcast junkie, and a senior studying English and Classics. She's been an editor for Xfic Journal and 34th Street Magazine, a Wexler Studio assistant at the Kelly Writers House, and producer and co-host of The Kidlit Chronicles, a podcast on children's literature. Her life revolves around her dog, Korean dramas, and brunch.

Gabriel García-Leeds is a puzzle creature, musician, and poet from Philadelphia. He performs as half of the Chinese-American folk duo River Full of Fruit, plays guitar in Primal Ratscrew, St. John's Wort, Mysteries of the Heart, and leads the experimental folk four-piece Ceiba. A UFO sometimes hovers above his home.

Tuesday, 3/22

Ladan Osman: a reading and conversation

Hosted by Husnaa Haajarah Hashim

7:00 PM (ET) on YouTube

sponsored by: The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and the Fund for Feminist Projects at the Kelly Writers House
watch: here

Ladan Osman is a Somali-born artist whose work is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press) and The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony (2015), winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. Her most recent collection Exiles of Eden, is a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Roar, Rumpus, among others. Osman's writing has been translated into over 10 languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn.


Wednesday, 3/23

SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT

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

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, 3/24

The Claw: A Reading

Featuring Piyali Bhattacharya, Ariel Delgado Dixon, Stephanie Feldman, Carmen Maria Machado, Sara Nović, and Asali Solomon

Lucid Fiction Program

6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube

Co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube

The Claw is a group of female and nonbinary professional writers based in Philadelphia, PA. This event, which is co-sponsored by Penn's Creative Writing Program and the Bob Lucid Memorial Fund for Fiction Programming, will feature short readings by Claw members Piyali Bhattacharya, Ariel Delgado Dixon, Stephanie Feldman, Sara Nović, and Asali Solomon, hosted by Carmen Maria Machado. A reception in the KWH Garden open to all will follow the event.

ASL interpretation will be provided.

Piyali Bhattacharya is the editor of the NEA grant-winning anthology, Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion . She is currently finishing her first novel, and is Writer in Residence at Penn.

Ariel Delgado Dixon was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. Her debut novel, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You, was released in February 2022 by Random House. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia.

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the award-winning debut novel The Angel of Losses and co-editor of the multigenre anthology Who Will Speak for America? Her second novel, Saturnalia, will be published in October 2022.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, and the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods.

Sara Nović is the author of Girl at War, and America is Immigrants. Her second novel, True Biz, is out from Random House on April 5th.

Asali Solomon's latest novel, The Days of Afrekete has been called “a feat of engineering” by the New York Times. She is also the author of Disgruntled and Get Down: stories.

Friday, 3/25

Saturday, 3/26

Sunday, 3/27

Monday, 3/28

A reading by Caroline Bergvall

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Watch: on YouTube

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet and sound artist working internationally across many print- sound- and performance-based media, with her work often focusing on the interdisciplinary and the multi-modal. Included in this is a strong focus on multilingual identities and the histories and contexts concealed and contained within language. Her published works include several chapbooks such as Strange Passage (1993) and several book length works such as the trilogy exploring medievalist language: Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014) and Alisoun Sings (2019). Bergvall's work has also been collected in several anthologies including The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (2015). Along with Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, Bergvall was an editor of the 2012 anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women. Bergvall has performed or made installation works in many museums and exhibitions worldwide, including Tate Modern, MOMA and the Whitney Biennial. Bergvall has taught at many universities throughout her career, most recently as a visiting professor at Kings College London. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Cholmondeley Award for her book Drift, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and Bergvall was the first ever recipient of the art literary prize Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou. Born in Hamburg, Germany, Bergvall grew up in Switzerland, Norway, France, the United States and England. She studied at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, received an MPhil from the University of Warwick, Britain, and a doctorate from the Dartington College of Arts. She currently resides in London.


Tuesday, 3/29

A conversation with Caroline Bergvall

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

10:00AM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Watch: on YouTube

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet and sound artist working internationally across many print- sound- and performance-based media, with her work often focusing on the interdisciplinary and the multi-modal. Included in this is a strong focus on multilingual identities and the histories and contexts concealed and contained within language. Her published works include several chapbooks such as Strange Passage (1993) and several book length works such as the trilogy exploring medievalist language: Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014) and Alisoun Sings (2019). Bergvall's work has also been collected in several anthologies including The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (2015). Along with Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, Bergvall was an editor of the 2012 anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women. Bergvall has performed or made installation works in many museums and exhibitions worldwide, including Tate Modern, MOMA and the Whitney Biennial. Bergvall has taught at many universities throughout her career, most recently as a visiting professor at Kings College London. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Cholmondeley Award for her book Drift, a Bogliasco Fellowship, and Bergvall was the first ever recipient of the art literary prize Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou. Born in Hamburg, Germany, Bergvall grew up in Switzerland, Norway, France, the United States and England. She studied at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, received an MPhil from the University of Warwick, Britain, and a doctorate from the Dartington College of Arts. She currently resides in London.


Wednesday, 3/30

Art, Lyric, and Movement

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon in conversation with Dagmawi Woubshet

12:00 PM in Arts Café and on YouTube

REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon was one of ten poets commissioned to write a poem for MOMA's 2015 exhibition, “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series.” At Writers House, Van Clief-Stefanon will read her poem “Migration” and talk with Professor Dagmawi Woubshet about the kinship between her poem and Lawrence's series.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Leading with a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle and Poems in Conversation and a Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective, and in 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women's suffrage and the fight for political equality, at National Theatre London. She is an associate professor of English at Cornell University.

Thursday, 3/31

“Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care”

A conversation with Law Professor Wendy Bach

12:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube

Hosted by: Al Filreis
Sponsored by: the Sylvia W. Kauders Series
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube

At the height of the opiate epidemic, Tennessee lawmakers made it a crime for a pregnant woman to transmit narcotics to a fetus. They promised that charging new mothers with this crime would help them receive the treatment and support they often desperately need. In Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care, Wendy Bach describes the law's actual effect through meticulous examination of the cases of 120 women who were prosecuted for this crime. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, Bach demonstrates that both prosecuting "fetal assault," and institutionalizing the all-too-common idea that criminalization is a road to care, lead at best to clinically dangerous and corrupt treatment, and at worst, and far more often, to an insidious smokescreen obscuring harsh punishment. Urgent, instructive, and humane, this retelling demands we stop criminalizing care and instead move towards robust and respectful systems that meet the real needs of families in poor communities.

Professor Wendy A. Bach is a nationally recognized expert in both clinical legal education and poverty law. She has been with the University of Tennessee College of Law since fall 2010. From 2005 to 2010, she taught in the clinical program at the City University of New York School of Law. Before entering the academy, she was director of the Homelessness Outreach and Prevention Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City and a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Brooklyn. Professor Bach has dedicated her career to representing children and families in poor communities in a variety of legal settings, and she continues to do so in UT College of Law's nationally-ranked clinical program. Her scholarship focuses on the interaction between systems of support and care and systems of punishment in poor communities and has been published in the William and Mary, Wisconsin, Brooklyn, and Michigan Law reviews, The Florida Tax Review and The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.

The Music of David Bowie

Featuring Richard Barone

5:00 PM ET in the Arts Café and on YouTube

Hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
Sponsored by: RealArts@Penn
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube

In an event hosted by Anthony DeCurtis, Richard Barone will discuss the music and career of David Bowie, and perform a number of his songs.

Richard Barone is an acclaimed recording artist, performer, producer, and author. A lifelong fan, Barone has collaborated extensively with Bowie producer Tony Visconti and official photographer Mick Rock, and was invited by Visconti to sing backing vocals on two Bowie sessions in the late 1990s. He pioneered the indie rock scene in Hoboken, NJ as frontman of The Bongos and helped to launch the chamber pop movement with his solo debut “cool blue halo.” His memoir Frontman: Surviving The Rock Star Myth was published by Hal Leonard Books. His album “Sorrows & Promises” and his current book project are celebrations of the 1960s music scene in Greenwich Village NYC, where Barone lives. He is affiliated with the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU and The New School's School of Jazz & Contemporary Music, serves on the Board of Governors of The Recording Academy (GRAMMYs), the Advisory Board of Anthology Film Archives, and hosts Folk Radio on WBAI FM, New York.