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Sunday, 11/1
- 2:00-3:30 PM: Dedication in memory of Alice
Cooper-Shoulberg
Listen to a recording of this event.
Alice Cooper Schoulberg was a brilliant student who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Education in 1955. Despite medical difficulties, she became a beloved and inspiring teacher at Overbrook High School, her alma mater. Alice's passion was English. In 1961, friends and relatives of Alice founded the Alice Cooper Shoulberg Scholarship Fund. For many years, this Fund granted an annual scholarship to promising graduates of Overbrook High School. The remainder of the Fund is now being donated to the Kelly Writers House, in memory of Alice, to support the creative publishing technology used by Penn students at Writers House.
Monday, 11/2
- 5:15-7:15 PM Penn and Pencil Club: a staff writing workshop
- 7:30 PM Philly Talks presents poets Fred Wah and Brian Kim
Stefans
Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939, but grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960's, where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. He did graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he edited Sum magazine. In 1967 he graduated with a masters degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo where he co-edited the Niagara Frontier Review and The Magazine of Further Studies. He returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960's, edited Scree, and taught at Selkirk College. He is currently a contributing editor to Open Letter. In 1989 he and his wife Pauline Butling moved to Calgary where he teaches at the University of Calgary. Waiting For Saskatchewan was awarded the Governor-General's Award in 1986. Wah has also written critiques of contemporary Canadian and American literature and he's presently working on a verse biotext about racial anger titled Seasons Greetings from the from the Diamond Grill. Wah's numerous books include: Tree (Vancouver Community Press, 1972) Earth (Institute of Further Studies, Canton, 1974) Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1975) Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poetry (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1980) Grasp The Sparrow's Tail (Kyoto, 1982) Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1987) Limestone Lakes Utaniki (Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1989) and Alley Alley Home Free (Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1992).
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (Roof, 1998) and the forthcoming Angry Penguins (Object). He has published work in a variety of journals, but also on the internet at the Jacket website (www.jacket.zip.com) under a pseudonym, and graphic poems and the essay "Stops and Rebels" at the ubu site (www.ubu.com). He edited/published three issues of the journal Arras before taking it to the web in 1998 (www.stern.nyu.edu/~bstefans). Essays and reviews have appeared in Korean Culture and the Poetry Project Newsletter, and a long essay on alternative Asian North Asian American writing is forthcoming in Talisman. A collaboration with Sianne Ngai, "The Cosmopolitans" was featured as the second issue of the zine Interlope, published by Summi Kaipa out of Iowa City. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is now working on a musical.
This program was recorded and is available through PENNsound.
Tuesday, 11/3
- 4:30 PM Eric Halpern, Director of University of Pennsylvania
Press, leads a workshop and discussion about working in the publishing
field.
Eric Halpern has been the director of University of Pennsylvania Press since 1995. Previously he was the Editor-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins University Press, where he coordinated the poetry and fiction titles. He was also responsible for managing a department of five full-time acquiring editors, one freelance acquiring editor, and four editorial assistants, while continuing personally to acquire for publication more than 30 humanities titles a year. He received a masters degree from Stanford University and a bachelors degree from Oxford University.
Wednesday, 11/4
- 5:00 PM: "How to Save a Magazine:" David Granger, editor-in-chief of Esquire, visits Writers House in a program hosted by Harrison House. Granger has written that his mission is to make Esquire the quintessential magazine for celebrating "the interests, the curiosity, the passions, of men." In his first year at Esquire, advertising pages have increased nearly 40 percent and circulation is up more than five percent. Granger came to Esquire from GQ, where he had served as Executive Editor since 1991. During Granger's tenure there, the magazine was nominated for eighteen National Magazine Awards. Previously, Granger was Executive Editor of Adweek and MediaWeek, where he helped reconceptualize the industry trade leaders.
Thursday, 11/5
- 5:30 PM Science fiction writer Barbara Chepaitis reads, followed by a question and answer period. Chepaitis is the author of The Fear Principle
Barbara Chepaitis, writing as B.A. Chepaitis, is author of the cyberpunk suspense novels The Fear Principle, The Fear of God, and Learning Fear featuring Jaguar Addams, a woman who rehabilitates killers by telepathically tapping into their subconscious fears. With over 15 years experience conducting writing and storytelling workshops for a wide range of audiences, Chepaitis is also recipient of an AWP award for her short fiction and has published short fiction and poetry in a variety of journals. Her current projects include editing the next two novels in the "Fear" series, selling the screenplay for the first novel, and working on a collaborative novel with members of a storytelling group.
Friday, 11/6
Saturday, 11/7
- 2:00-4:00 PM Saturday Reading Project
- 5:00 PM: Dr. Tamar Frankiel, author of Minding the Temple of the Soul : Balancing Body, Mind, and Spirit Through Traditional Jewish Prayer, Movement, and Meditation, and The Voice of Sarah : Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism, reads and speaks on the issues of women and career. Co-sponsored by the Penn Women's Center, the Hillel Educational Committee, and the Lubavitch House at Penn.
Sunday, 11/8
Monday, 11/9
- 8:00 PM Join the audience of the spoken-word radio show LIVE at the Writers House! This show features Rebekah Grossman, Dave Goldman, Jenn McCreary, Bob Perelman, Seth Greenberg, Caitlin Roper, Barbara Cole, and Madelaine Sauk.
Tuesday, 11/10
- 5:30 PM: Israeli writer Savyon Liebrecht visits Writers House for a talk entitled "Faces of Contemporary Israel," followed by a book-signing. Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Center, Women's Studies Program, Jewish Studies Program, and Kutchin Seminars, and the Israeli Consulate in Philadelphia. Savyon Liebrecht is a famous Israeli writer, one of the new wave of women writers who are only now beginning to become a major voice in Israel's mainstream literature. Her writing raises important issues, as she touches upon some of the most painful subjects in Israeli society, such as gender inequity, the treatment of Arabs, and the problems of Holocaust memories (she is a daughter of Holocaust survivors). A collection of her stories, Apples from the Desert, has just been published by The Feminist Press of CUNY.
Wednesday, 11/11
- 12:00-1:00 PM Gay Talese discusses the important elements of
literary non-fiction. Audience space will be limited; R.S.V.P. is
required.
Talese is the author of the recently-acclaimed best seller, Unto the Sons, a historical memoir that spanned two world wars and possessed what Norman Mailer called "the sweep and detail of a grand 19th-century novel." Mr. Talese's earlier best sellers deal with the history and influence of the New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power); the inside story of a Mafia family (Honor Thy Father); the changing moral values of America between World War II and the era before AIDS (Thy Neighbor's Wife); and such other books as The Bridge, about the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows span between Brooklyn and Staten Island. He has been credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called "The New Journalism." - 5:00-7:00 PM: Open Discussion with Mohamed Salmawy, Egyptian playwright, and Abdel Aziz Hammouda, Dean, Faculty of Literature, Cairo University. Co-sponsored by The Middle East Center and the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
- 8:00-10:00 PM Speakeasy:
Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes
an open mic performance night
Thursday, 11/12
- 12:00-1:00: Penn-Edison Program students come and visit Writers House!
- 4:30 PM: Planning Committee Meeting!
- 6:00 PM Poet Rae Armantrout reads!
Rae Armantrout has published six books of poetry: Extremities (The Figures, 1978), The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba, 1979), Precedence (Burning Deck, 1985), Necromance (Sun And Moon, 1991), Couverture (a selected in French translation, Les Cahiers de Royaumont, 1991), and Made to Seem (Sun And Moon, 1995). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including In The American Tree (National Poetry Foundation), Language Poetries (New Directions), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, From The Other Side Of The Century (Sun And Moon) and Out of Everywhere (Reality Street). Armantrout teaches at the University of California at San Diego.
Second in the Transparency Machine series. RSVP for dinner to follow.
Recordings of this event that have been made available as part of the PENNsound project can be found here.
Friday, 11/13
- 12:00 PM: Editors David Stern and Mark Mirsky read from and discuss
their anthology, Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from
Classical Hebrew Literature. Co-sponsored by Hillel and the Kutchin
Seminars of the Jewish Studies Program.
David Stern is Professor of Postbiblical and Medieval Hebrew Literature in the Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and is also a member of the Depts of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature. He has translated both ancient and modern Hebrew literature, and has written widely on Jewish literature, both in academic journals and in periodicals like the New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Commentary, and Tikkun.
Mark Jay Mirsky is the editor of Fiction, an international magazine of prose that he founded with Donald Barthelme, Max and Marianne Frisch, and others in 1972. He has been Director of the M.A. in Creative Writing at The City College of New York, and is presently Director of its Program in Jewish Studies. He has published five novels and collections of short fiction, Thou Worm Jacob, Blue Hill Avenue, Proceedings of the Rabble, The Secret Table, and The Red Adam. His book The Absent Shakespeare was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is co-editor of Rabbinic Fantasies and the editor of The Diaries of Robert Musil. His last published novel, The Red Adam was hailed as creating a new gendre, "American Jewish gothic." - 5:00 PM Lan Samantha Chang has been teaching
creative writing at Stanford since January of 1995, and her first book of
short stories, titled Hunger is coming out from Norton in October.
A novel is forthcoming in the fall of 2000. She's had success publishing
her stories in journals, and was twice chosen for inclusion in The Best
American Short Stories anthologies (1996 and 1994). RSVP to
wh@writing.upenn.edu for dinner
to follow.
Listen to a recording of this event.
Saturday, 11/14
- 2:00-4:00 PM: Saturday Reading Project
- 2:00-3:00PM: Laughing
Hermit reading series, hosted by Robin
Hiteshew, presents Margaret
Holley. Holley is the author of several collections of poetry,
including Smoke Trees (1991), which won the Blue Stem Award,
Morning Glory (Copper Beech Press) and Kore in Bloom (Copper Beach
Press). She was born in Detroit,
Michigan and was educated at Wellesley and Bryn Mawr colleges. She is
currently the Director of the Creative Writing Program
at Bryn Mawr.
- Beatnik Night at Writers
House!
9:00-11:00 PM Presented by the King's Court/English House Humanities Program and the Writers House. It's all just an open mic night for rhymers and scribblers, but with a groovy, underground atmosphere, and all that jazz. Start working on a crazy new gig daddy-o, or just bring one of your faves, ya dig! Be a part of the "beat generation" along with crazy cats like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Cassady. To find out the scoop or to help with the scene, e-mail Joe Lee at joseph4@seas.upenn.edu. See you Saturday night, at the place to Be!
Sunday, 11/15
- 10:30 PM LIVE at the Writers House airs on WXPN, 88.5 FM
Monday, 11/16
- 6:00 PM: Translating Oral Poetry: A Reading and Discussion with Homer
Translator Stanley Lombardo
Stanley Lombardo is a professor of classics at the University of Kansas and a gifted translator, who has produced acclaimed versions of Hesiod, Callimachus, Horace, and the Tao Te Ching. Last year he published a strikingly contemporary translation of Homer's Iliad (with an introduction by Penn professor Sheila Murnaghan) that has been called "gripping," "wonderfully fresh," and "as good as Homer gets in English." What sets Lombardo's Iliad apart is his ability to capture the living voice of poetry that was created in oral performance rather than written down to be read, in a style that is shaped by his own dramatic performances of Homer. Lombardo will read from his Iliad and from his forthcoming translation of the Odyssey and will discuss the challenges involved in re-creating ancient oral poetry for a modern audience.
Tuesday, 11/17
- 6:00 PM The Alumni Writers Series presents Stephen Fried, author of Bitter Pills (Bantam, 1998), reads in the Arts Cafe. RSVP for dinner to follow.
- Stephen
Fried is an investigative journalist. His work
has
appeared
frequently in Vanity Fair, The Washington Post Magazine, Glamour,
GQ, and Philadelphia magazine, and his articles on drug safety
brought him his second consecutive National Magazine Award, the highest
honor in magazine journalism. His previous book was the widely praised
Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia. He lives in
Philadelphia with his wife, the writer Diane Ayres.
Wednesday, 11/18
- 6:00 PM: Talking Film presents: A discussion with Jon Katz and Penny Marcus about film at Penn.
Thursday, 11/19
-
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
- 7:00 PM Theorizing in Particular presents Professor Tom
Levin, speaking on "The Aesthetics of Surveillance."
Part of Go West! Go International! 3rd Thursdays.
Thomas Levin joined the faculty at Princeton in 1990 after completing graduate study in art history at Yale University and after a year as a fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. His teaching and scholarship range from the history of aesthetic theory and Frankfurt School cultural theory to the history and theory of media (Weimar cinema, rhetoric of new media, archaeologies of vision). His recent work on questions of aesthetics, technology, and sound have grown out of his research on metronomes, gramophones, and the prehistory of acoustic inscription, as well as his responsibilities as associate editor of The Musical Quarterly. Levin is currently working on a study of the origins of synthetic sound in the late 1920's, a new project on surveillance, and a book on the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.
Friday, 11/20
- 8:00-10:00 PM Kelly Writers House and DuBois College House
present:
Songs and Poems of Protest, Power and Praise
Part of the Paul Robeson Centennial Series and Unity Week
Saturday, 11/21
- 2:00-4:00 PM Saturday Reading Project
Sunday, 11/22
Monday, 11/23
Tuesday, 11/24
- 6:00 PM: Poet Nicole Markotic reads.
Markotic teaches Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at the University of Calgary. She has published two books of poetry, minotaurs & other alphabets and Connect the Dots as well as a novel and several poetry chapbooks. She co-publishes the chapbook press disOrientation books, and works as a free-lance editor as well as writer in Calgary, Alberta.
Wednesday, 11/25
- Thanksgiving break begins
Writers House closes Wedensday at 5:00 pm and reopens on Sunday, November 29, at 7:00 pm. Have a wonderful break!
Monday, 11/30
