December 2016
Thursday, 12/1
RealArts@Penn Summer Internships
Information and lunch
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or 215-746-POEM
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Have you been dreaming of the perfect summer internship? The one that will change your life forever? RealArts@Penn can help make that dream a reality! RealArts@Penn offers paid summer internships in publishing, TV and film, journalism, public relations, talent management, music, theater, and museums. Premier partner/host organizations have included Viacom, McSweeney’s, Downtown Bookworks, Pitchfork Media, 20th Century Fox and Di Novi Pictures. The project draws upon a vast network of creative alumni who help enable hands-on and face-to-face interactions between students and the people who make arts and culture their business. Join us for an informal conversation with past RealArts interns to learn more about the project and the application process.
The Body Electric
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Friday, 12/2
Saturday, 12/3
Sunday, 12/4
Monday, 12/5
Jed Rasula: on Dada
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Jed Rasula is the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, where he is currently Head of the English Department. Before coming to Georgia in 2001 he taught for ten years at Queen’s University in Canada. His PhD is from the History of Consciousness Program at U. C. Santa Cruz. His involvement in the poetry community goes back to the 1970s, as editor of Wch Way (1975-1984) and author of Tabula Rasula (Station Hill 1986). Subsequent poetry titles are Hot Wax, or Psyche’s Drip (Book Thug 2007) and Giacometti’s Dog (Opo Books 2017). He has co-edited two large anthologies: Imagining Language with Steve McCaffery (MIT 1998) and Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity with Tim Conley (Action Books 2012). Scholarly monographs are The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940-1990 (National Council of Teachers of English 1996), This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (U. Georgia Press 2002), Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (U. Alabama Press 2004), Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford U.P. 2016). Rasula’s history of the Dada movement, Destruction Was My Beatrice, was published by Basic Books in 2015. Forthcoming is Relentless Metabolism: The Pathos of Making It New.
Tuesday, 12/6
Poetry, Prose, and Language Excursions
Students of Julia Bloch & Laynie Browne
3:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Come hear readings by students in Laynie Browne's Writing Philadelphia first-year seminar, together with the students of Julia Bloch's Poetry Writing Workshop, who will present work from across the semester. Students in these classes have explored the contours of writing poetry and prose in a variety of spaces and critical frames, and what it means to use language to engage with the world around us.
GETTING WHIPPED IN THE RUSSIAN SPA, ROOFTOP THIEVES, AND A GEOMETRY OF FEAR
Students of Jay Kirk
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Join us for readings by students in Jay Kirk’s class (Narrative Nonfiction: The Art of Experience) as they close out an extraordinary semester of work. Open to the public; refreshments served.
Wednesday, 12/7
Students of Kathryn Watterson
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Personal essayists — at their best — tell us what they don’t know, as well as what they imagine to be true. Following this ideal, students in Kathryn Watterson’s writing seminar wrote personal essays about experiences that have helped shaped them, ideas that sparked their imaginations, and cultural and societal issues about which they care deeply. All are welcome to hear selections from a semester of exploration, discovery, and imaginative work.
Thursday, 12/8
Students of Anna Maria Hong
3:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Students in Anna Maria Hong’s creative writing course studied and practiced writing focused on the real and imagined lives of animals, including ancient fables and 21st-century stories, poems, essays, and hybrid-genre works. Writing experiments, reading, discussion, and animal observations helped students explore the possibilities of creative writing and the fine and ferocious literature concerning great and small beasts.
Students of Jason Zuzga & Melissa Jensen
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Students of Melissa Jensen’s speculative fiction course will join students of Jason Zuzga’s poetry and prose course for an evening of imagined futures, alternate histories, sci-fi, and great poetry and prose, honed over the course of the semester.
Friday, 12/9
Saturday, 12/10
Sunday, 12/11
Monday, 12/12
Students of Karen Rile
2:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Students of Karen Rile’s advanced fiction writing course spent the semester focusing on their narrative craft. Join them in celebrating a semester of intensive writing and revision.
Students of Jamie-Lee Josselyn
4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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The students of Jamie-Lee Josselyn's English 10 have spent the semester writing personal essays about their grade school days, their complex relationships, objects that are both extraordinary and ordinary, and places familiar and foreign. They have been inspired by work by Mary Kate, David Sedaris, Phillip Lopate, Jamaica Kincaid, and, most of all, by one another. (And by snacks too!)
Students of Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Staged readings of original stories, including but not limited to: science fiction that's better than Arrival, coming-of-age stories better than Good Will Hunting and a political satire that will make you smile instead of cry. Open to the public; refreshments served. Join us!