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September 2008

Monday, 9/1

5:30 PM - 7:00 PM: Open House.

Visit Penn's hub for writers and talk to community members and student leaders about how to get involved in literary magazines, literacy outreach, writing groups, poetry readings, and more. Meet representatives from the KWH Planning Committee, the Common Press, F-Word, Penn Review, Quake, The Green Couch, First Call, and Write-on, among others.

7:00 PM in the Garden: NSO Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, Anything Goes!

An open-mic night featuring performances by the class of 2012 and others. Share your amazing talents with your classmates! All kinds of readings/performances are welcome. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your award-winning essay -- or just come to hang out and listen. There will be raffle prizes from local merchants and restaurants.


Tuesday, 9/2

Wednesday, 9/3

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 9/4

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Friday, 9/5

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Saturday, 9/6

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Sunday, 9/7

Monday, 9/8

4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: The podcast series "PoemTalk" records episode #14

Kathleen Fraser, "The Cars"

Poemtalk logoJoin PoemTalk moderator and host Al Filreis and three friends in the poetics community as they discuss a single poem from the PennSound archive. Episode #14 features a discussion of Kathleen Fraser's "The Cars" with Kristen Gallagher, Jessica Lowenthal and CA Conrad. PoemTalk is sponsored by the Writers House and CPCW in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation. For more, see poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com. If you would like to be a member of the live audience, RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/9

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Wednesday, 9/10

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Thursday, 9/11

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: KWH Art opening for Word Each to Cling I

A series of photographs by Erica Baum based on pianola rolls

Erica Baum received a B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University in 1984 and an M.F.A. in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 1994. She has exhibited in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City, Germany, Italy and France. Her work will be shown in the upcoming show titled Subject, Index at the Malmo Konstmuseum in Malmo, Sweden. Her work has been reviewed in ArtForum and Art in America and she was recently included in the book Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography, edited by TJ Demos (Phaidon Press, 2006).

A recording of this event can be found here.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 9/12

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Saturday, 9/13

Sunday, 9/14

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Monday, 9/15

5:30 PM: Writers House Planning Committee ("the Hub") meeting

Please RSVP to jalowent@writing.upenn.edu. Join us for pizza and a discussion of upcoming projects.

Any Penn-affiliated person (student, staff member, faculty) is welcome to join the Writers House Planning Committee. At this first meeting of the year we will discuss ways you can get involved -- from literacy outreach to food writing. Go here to get a sense of what we do; go here for sound clips and photos from our end-of-year party; go here for a list of campus publications.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/16

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: a presentation by writer and filmmaker Liza Béar

Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies program.

Liza Bear Liza Béar is a New York-based writer, filmmaker and activist. In the 70s, she co-founded and edited the legendary conceptual art magazine Avalanche. She has taught in the graduate film departments of Columbia and New York University. In 1990 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in creative non-fiction, and in 1994, an Edward Albee Writing Fellowship for her short stories. Her new book, Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers, is a selection of her interviews with filmmakers from 23 countries. She is a contributing editor at Bomb.

Visit her blogs: http://lizabearmakingbook.blogspot.com and http://squaringoff.blip.tv.

(photo: self-portrait)


You can download a recording of this event here.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 9/17

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: a lunch talk with Connie Chung

RSVP required. RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 573-9748.

Connie ChungConnie Chung was born and raised in Washington D. C. and received her journalism degree at the University of Maryland in 1969. She was a Washington-based correspondent for CBS Evening News in the early 70's, after which she worked in Los Angeles for local station KCBS. She returned to network news in NBC News at Sunrise, but returned to CBS to host CBS Evening News (becoming the second woman to co-anchor a national news network). She become known for her ABC's 20/20 and independent interviews after 1995, where she interviewed subjects such as Claus von Bulow and Representative Gary Condit.


8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

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Thursday, 9/18

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: A reading and discussion with poet Robert Wrigley.

Co-sponsored by Creative Writing

Robert Wrigley Robert Wrigley was born in 1951 in East St. Louis, Ill. He was the first member of his family ever to graduate from college and the first male -- in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales and Germany -- never to work in a coal mine.

In 1971, he was inducted into the U.S. Army but filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection.

Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program.

He has published six books of poetry: The Sinking of Clay City (1979); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); What My Father Believed (1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995); Reign of Snakes (1999); and The Lives of Animals (2003).

He has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, two Pushcart Prizes and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, near Moscow, Idaho.

Download a recording of this event here.

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Friday, 9/19

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Saturday, 9/20

Sunday, 9/21

Monday, 9/22

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: LIVE at the Writers House

Featuring local Philadelpia poets Thomas Devaney, Randall Couch, Trapeta B. Mayson, Scott Edward Anderson, Ish Klein and musical guest Hezekiah Jone

Thomas Devaney Thomas Devaney is the author of A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999). Devaney is a Senior Writing Fellow in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY where he was a student of Allen Ginsberg. In 2001 he joined the Kelly Writers House for four years as program coordinator and producer of "Live at the Writers House." Devaney has worked with the Institute of Contemporary Art (Phila.) on a number of site specific, multi-sensory projects including "No Silence Here, Enjoy the Silence" for the Locally Localized Gravity exhibit and "The Empty House" at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site for The Big Nothing exhibit. Devaney is the co-curator for the current exhibit on Edgar Allan Poe for Poe's 200th birthday at the Central branch of the Philadelphia Free Library, which runs until February 2009.

Randall Couch Randall Couch edited and translated Madwomen: The Locas mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is a regular panelist on the podcast series PoemTalk sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, PennSound, and Kelly Writers House. He has published essays and book chapters on Ezra Pound, Gabriela Mistral, and Harryette Mullen. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets 2005 and Xconnect: Writers of the Information Age VIII. In 2000 and 2008 he was awarded fellowships in poetry by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

As Adjunct Professor of English at Arcadia University, he has taught advanced poetry writing and poetics since 2003. From 1989 he has served on the professional staff of the University of Pennsylvania. Trained as an art conservator, between 1980 and 1989 he held positions at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, U.T. Austin's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

He holds an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in English from Trinity University and an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers.

Trapeta MaysonTrapeta Mayson is a poet, workshop leader and educator. She has worked extensively with young people and adults in educational, artistic and institutional settings, conducting creative writing and self-expression workshops. She currently works with The Painted Bride Art Center and the Art Sanctuary, developing and facilitating youth oriented activities. She has received numerous literary awards and fellowships, including a Pew Fellowship, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grants and a Leeway Transformation Award. Trapeta is a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow and has completed residencies at schools, community agencies and artistic institutions. Trapeta's second collection of poems will be completed in 2008. Trapeta is a graduate of Temple University and Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. She is a social worker/therapist working with children, adults and families throughout Philadelphia.

Scott Edward AndersonScott Edward Anderson has been a Concordia Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts and received both the Nebraska Review Award and the Aldrich Emerging Poets Award. His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, CrossConnect, Earth's Daughters, Isotope, Many Mountains Moving, Nebraska Review, Poetica, River Oak Review, and Terrain, among other publications. He was a founding editor of Philadelphia's Ducky Magazine and writes The Green Skeptic blog.

Ish Klien Ish Klein's book "Union!" will be coming out this February on the Canarium Press. She is self-taught film and puppet maker who writes poems. She is an alumna of Columbia University and of the Iowa Writer's Workshop for Poetry, MFA 1997. In 2005, she was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts Digital Filmmaker Residency.

Her films have screened at the 2005 and 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival, Arlene's Picture Show, the Stuttgart Film Winter (2006, 2007), The One Minute Film Festival in Aarau Switzerland, Philadelphia's ICA (2007, 2008), and have been honored by the IFP's Project Involve Program. Her poems have been published in Bridge, The Canary, Gare du Nord, and more recently in Hat magazine, X-connect, Big Bridge, Spork and Gut Cult.

Hezikiah Jones Hezekiah Jones is Raphael Cutrufello, who writes the songs and plays piano, guitar, rhodes piano, harmonica, melodica, slide whistle, vocals, pots and pans, kazoo, xylophone, and accordian along with many friends who form his live and recording bands.

"...His is a folk that has contemporary equals in artists like M. Ward, Iron & Wine, and Will Oldham. "Nothing's Bound," though, is a waltz-y acoustic folk number that has the subtle flavor of Ray Davies and Paul Simon in its delivery. Moody, sparse and dark just below candlelight, Cutrufello's songs are somewhat quirky only so in subtle ways, and mostly in the lyrics. Although there is nothing subtle about the slide whistle that accompanies the jaunty piano number "Writing Letters In The Morning." This is not your average musical poetry." – Robinson, Miles Of Music

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).

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/23

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Writers Without Borders presents a celebration of New European Poets

Featuring editors and translators Marella Feltrin-Morris, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Adam J. Sorkin, J.C. Todd and moderator Wayne Miller.

New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) presents the exciting works of poets from across Europe. In compiling this landmark anthology, editors Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer enlisted twenty-four regional editors to select and translate 290 poets, whose writing was first published after 1968. These poets represent every country in Europe, and many of them are published here for the first time in English or in the United States. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugenio Montale, and Czeslaw Milosz.

Join us for a discussion of the anthology -- the joys and challenges of translation, the process of selection, the field of European poetry and poetics -- and for selected readings by the translators.

Marella Feltrin-MorrisMarella Feltrin-Morris is Assistant Professor of Italian at Ithaca College, specializing in late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Italian Literature and in Translation Studies. She is also a freelance translator. Among her published translations are Domenico Losurdo's Heidegger and the Ideology of War and Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns, short stories by Massimo Bontempelli, Stefano Benni and Laura Pariani (in collaboration with Chad Davidson), and poems by Giampiero Neri, Davide Rondoni, Raffaello Baldini, and Fabio Pusterla.


Murat Nemet-NejatMurat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on a poem, entitled The Structure of Escape: A Comic Essay on Poetry, and on the translation of the Turkish poet Seyhan Erozçelik's Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, which will be published by Talisman House in 2008. Poet, translator and essayist, Murat Nemet-Nejat's work includes: "I Did My Best Work During a Writer's Block" (poem), First Identity, 2008; "A trillion plus one is smaller than a trillion plus two" (poem), Boog Reader 2: An Anthology of New York City Poetry, 2008; "A Special Section on Turkish Eda poetry" (Jacket 34, 2007); "Ideas Towards a Theory of Translation in Eda" (essay), International Exchange for Poetic Invention, Talisman, 2007; "Maritime Fragments" (poem), The Recluse, 2007; "Eleven Septembers Later: Readings of Benjamin Hollander's Vigilance" (essay), Beyond Baroque Books, 2005; Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, ed. by Murat Nemet-Nejat, Talisman House, 2004; "The Peripheral Space of Photography" (essay), Green Integer Press, 2003; "steps" (poem), Mirage, 2003; Frédéric Brenner. Diaspora: homelands in exile, voices (essays), HarperCollins Publishers, 2003; Io's Song (poem). 1998; Ece Ayhan. A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Sun & Moon Press, 1997); "Questions of Accent" (essay), The Exquisite Corpse, 1993; Turkish Voices (poems), The Poetry Project, 1992; Veli, Orhan. I, Orhan Veli (Hanging Loose Press, 1989); The Bridge (poem) (London: Martin Brian &

Adam Sorkin Adam J. Sorkin's recent books of translation include Ruxandra Cesereanu's Crusader-Woman, translated mainly with Cesereanu (Black Widow Press, 2008); two 2007 books, Magda Cârneci's Bucures,ti: O colect,ie de mirosuri / A Collection of Smells, translated with Alina Cârâc–photographs by Dan Hayon (Editura Institutul Cultural Român), and Radu Andriescu's The Catalan Within (Longleaf Press), translated with the poet; and three 2006 books: Magda Cârneci's Chaosmos, translated with Cârneci (White Pine Press), Mihai Ursachi's The March to the Stars (Vinea Press), mostly done with the poet, and Mariana Marin's Paper Children, with various collaborators (Ugly Duckling Presse). Sorkin won the Translation Prize of The Poetry Society, London, for Marin Sorescu's The Bridge, translated with Lidia Vianu (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), and he has been awarded U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Academy of American Poets, Arts Council of England, Fulbright, and Witter Bynner Foundation support for his work. Sorkin was Regional Editor for Romania and Moldova of New European Poets. He has published more than thirty books of translation, and he has placed the work of over 150 Romanian writers in 350 periodicals and reviews in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State Brandywine.

J.C. Todd J.C. Todd is author of What Space This Body (Wind Publications 2008) and two chapbooks from Pine Press, Nightshade and Entering Pisces. Poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Wild River Review, New European Poets Anthology, and on Verse Daily and the Princeton Public Library podcast series. Between 2001-07, she was a contributing editor for the international poetry webmagazine The Drunken Boat, editing three features on Eastern European contemporary poetry in translation: Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia. Awards include two Leeway Awards for Poetry, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and fellowships to Schloss Wiepersdorf arts colony in Germany and the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators in Sweden. A visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, she will read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in September.


Wayne Miller, co-editor of New European Poets, is the author of two books of poems, The Book of Props and Only the Senses Sleep, as well as translator of Moikom Zeqo's I Don't Believe in Ghosts. He teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he co-edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.


Download a complete recording of this event here, or visit PennSound's page for this event for individual files.

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Wednesday, 9/24

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe: Medias Res

A celebration of medievalist literature and culture, co-sponsored by the English Department.

Download a complete recording of this event here

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Thursday, 9/25

Charles Bernheimer Symposium

Download a recording of this event here.

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Friday, 9/26

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Saturday, 9/27

Sunday, 9/28

Monday, 9/29

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Tuesday, 9/30

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: A reading and discussion with poet Ben Lerner

Ben Lener Ben Lerner's first book, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon, 2004), was a Lannan Literary Selection and was named one of the year's best books of poetry by Library Journal. Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, Lerner co-founded and co-edits No: a journal of the arts. He recently joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

A recording of this reading is available on Lerner's PennSound author page

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