Annual programs

Alumni Weekend

May 14, 2011: Jennifer Egan & Sam Donsky

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling The Keep. Her new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in June 2010. Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

Sam Donsky (C'07) is a second-year student at Penn Law School. He has been involved with Kelly Writers House since 2003 and first shared the KWH podium with Jennifer Egan in May 2005. Donsky's first poetry manuscript, Poems vs. the Volcano, is a collection of 100 poems – one for each movie that he has seen since graduating from college.

May 15, 2010: Beth Kephart & Alice Elliott Dark

Beth Kephart is the author of ten books, including the National Book Award finalist, A Slant of Sun (1998, W.W. Norton and Company); the BookSense pick, Ghosts in the Garden (2005, New World Library); the autobiography of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, Flow (2007, Temple University Press); and the critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Undercover (2007, HarperTeen), House of Dance (2008, HarperCollins), and Nothing but Ghosts (2009, HarperCollins). A fourth young adult novel, The Heart is Not a Size, will be released in March 2010 and a fifth, Dangerous Neighbors, is slated for a fall 2010 release from Egmont. Beth Kephart's acclaimed short story, "The Longest Distance," appears in the May 2009 HarperTeen anthology, No Such Thing as the Real World. She is a winner of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fiction grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Leeway grant, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize, among other honors. Kephart's essays are frequently anthologized, she has judged numerous competitions, and she has taught workshops at many institutions, to all ages. In the fall of 2009, Kephart will teach at the University of Pennsylvania and serve as the readergirlz author in residence. Kephart is the strategic writing partner in the boutique marketing communications firm, Fusion. She is at work on a novel for adults.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of two story collections, Naked to the Waist (1991, Houghton Mifflin Co.) and In the Gloaming (2001, Simon & Schuster), and one novel, Think of England (2002, Simon & Schuster). Originally from Bryn Mawr, PA, she attended Kenyon College and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a B.A. in Chinese studies. She received her MA from the Antioch University program in London. Dark has published stories in Doubletake, Book Magazine, Five Points, and Redbook, and contributed essays and reviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar. Her short story "In the Gloaming" was included in the Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, and also selected for The Best American Short Stories 1994 by Tobias Wolff. In 1997, it was adapted into an HBO film starring Glenn Close and directed by Christopher Reeve. She is the recipient of an NEA grant and has led numerous workshops. Currently, she lives in New Jersey where she is the Writer in Residence at Rutgers-Newark University.

May 16, 2009: Nick Spitzer's "American Routes: Songs and Stories from the Road"

Folklorist Nick Spitzer is professor of communication and American studies at Tulane University where he began as a Mellon Humanities Fellow in 2004. Nick is also the producer and host of the radio program Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to the State (1985), and The Mississippi Delta Ethnographic Overview (1979) for the National Park Service. He helped create the Folklife Pavilion at the 1984 World's Fair, where he curated The Creole State: An Exhibition of Louisiana Folklife (1984-2004). He served as senior folklife specialist at the Smithsonian (1985-1990) and artistic director for the Folk Masters concert/broadcasts from Carnegie Hall and Wolf Trap (1990-1997) and the Independence Day concerts broadcast from the National Mall (1992-2001).

Nick has been a commentator/producer for NPR's All Things Considered and Fresh Air, PBS's Great Performances, CBS' Sunday Morning, and ABC's Nightline, and Evening News with Peter Jennings. Spitzer directed the film Zydeco: Creole Music and Culture in Rural Louisiana (1986), and has produced or annotated two dozen documentary recordings. In 2002 Nick co-curated 'Raised to the Trade': Creole Building Arts of New Orleans at New Orleans Museum of Art. He is co-editor of the book Public Folklore (1992, 2007) and co-author of Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (2006, Penn Press). A former resident scholar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, Spitzer received the Benjamin Botkin Award in Public Folklore, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Excellence in Broadcasting Award for American Routes, and was named Louisiana Humanist of the Year in 2006 for cultural recovery efforts after the catastrophe. His interests include Gulf Coast ethnography, cultural creolization, American vernacular music/culture, and public cultural policy. Nick was a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow working on traditional creativity in Louisiana Creole communities.


May 17, 2008: A poetry reading featuring former students of Professor Dan Hoffman

For many years the Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Penn before his retirement, Dan Hoffman taught literature courses in the English Department as well as one poetry workshop each year for students of exceptional ability. That one workshop, it turns out, was the foundation upon which Penn's Creative Writing Program was built. The success of Dan's work as a teacher is also evident in the many students who have developed fine careers as poets and teachers themselves.

Readings by Dan's former students — Christina Davis (C'93, G'93), Michael Jennings (C'71), Jay Rogoff (C '75), and J. Allyn Rosser (G'88, GR'91) — were followed by Dan's reading of selections from the work his late wife, the poet Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman.



May 12, 2007: A Celebration of Young Alumni Fiction Writers

Click on the image to see a video

Click above for a QuickTime video excerpt: Jessica Lowenthal introduces Courtney Zoffness and Courtney begins her reading

Michael Hyde ('95), whose stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and who recieved a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and a FundaciÛn ValparaÌso artist grant, read from his short story collection What Are You Afraid Of? which won the 2005 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. "Her Hollywood"

Courtney Zoffness ('00), who founded and ran the "Speakeasy" open mic series at the Kelly Writers House, has published nonfiction in Ladies' Home Journal, the Earth Times, and New York's daily Metro, among others, and fiction in publications such as Redivider, the Pedestal Magazine, Washington Square Review, and the Fish Prize Stories Anthology — an international contest. Zoffness works as a copyeditor at Rolling Stone magazine and as a ghostwriter. She's also at work on a novel of her own. She read an excerpt from her book Is It a Fish?

Laura Dave's writing has appeared in Self, Glamour, The New York Observer, and ESPN the Magazine. She is the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, and an AWP Intro Award in Short Fiction. She read an excerpt from her first novel, London Is the Best City in America (Viking 2006), which is currently being developed as a major motion picture at Universal Studios.

A free, downloadable recording of the entire event is available here.