Annual programs

The Charles Bernheimer symposium

November 11, 2010: Judy Wicks

a local lunch conversation about food, politics, and activism

Judy Wicks is owner and founder of Philadelphia's 25-year-old White Dog Cafe, and is a national leader in the local, living economies movement. She is co-founder of the nationwide Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN). She is also president of White Dog Community Enterprises, a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region.

Judy has won numerous awards, including the James Beard Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year in 2005, and the Philadelphia Sustainability Awards Life Time Achievement in 2007. Other accolades include Oprah Magazine's "5 Amazingly Gifted and Giving Food Professionals," and Inc. Magazine's 25 favorite entrepreneurs. Judy co-authored The White Dog Cafe Cookbook: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia's Revolutionary Restaurant, and is currently working on a book about her business and the local living economy movement to be published by Chelsea Green.

With a four-part mission of serving customers, community, employees, and the natural environment, the White Dog Cafe has created numerous educational and community-building programs which focus on topics such as economic & social justice, environmental protection, peace & non-violence, drug policy reform and community arts. Through "Table for Six Billion, Please!" the international "sister restaurant" project Judy began in 1986, she has organized trips to Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Vietnam, and Israel / Palestine in order to understand the effects of US policy. A local sister restaurant program promotes minority-owned restaurants in Philadelphia and Camden. In 1992, Judy began the White Dog mentoring program, which introduces inner-city high school students to the restaurant business through internships at the Cafe. Her adjacent gift store, the Black Cat, founded in 1989, features local and fair trade crafts. White Dog Enterprises, which includes White Dog Cafe and Black Cat, employs over 100 people and grosses approximately $5 million annually, demonstrating the concept of "doing well by doing good."

The Cafe sources all produce in season from local organic family farms. All meat and poultry is humanely raised, and fish and seafood are sourced from sustainable fisheries. One hundred percent of electricity is purchased from wind power sources, the first business in Pennsylvania to do so. Entry-level employees make a minimum "living wage" of $9/hour. Twenty percent of profits are contributed to White Dog Community Enterprises and other non-profits. Community Enterprise projects have included Fair Food, which connects local family farms with urban markets, and SBN, which was spun off in 2006.

Judy has appeared on Nightline, MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and numerous local TV and radio shows. She and the Cafe have been featured in Oprah Magazine, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Fortune Small Business, Washington Post, Whole Earth Magazine, Utne Reader, Yes Magazine, Fast Company, Healthy Living Magazine, Business Ethics Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Chronicle of Higher Education, Resurgence Magazine, Hope Magazine, Sojourner Magazine, In Business, Orion Magazine, The Other Side, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine and the Philadelphia Business Journal. Judy's business career is featured in several books including Making a Life, Making a Living: Reclaiming Your Purpose and Passion in Business and Life by Mark Albion, Good News for a Chance: How Everyday People Are Helping the Planet by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, and Aiming Higher: 25 Stories of How Companies Prosper by Combining Sound Management and Social Vision by David Bollier.

Judy was co-founder of the Free People's Store, now called Urban Outfitters, in 1970, and general manager and co-proprietor of Restaurant LaTerrasse from 1974 to 1984.

She was also co-founder and President of Synapse, Inc. a non-profit publishing company, and editor and art director of its publications, the Whole City Catalog in 1972 and 1974, and the Philadelphia Resource Guide in 1982.


November 10, 2009: Leonard Cassuto and S.J. Rozan

a conversation about crime fiction

What is the attraction of crime fiction? (And of genre fiction generally?) How has the hard-boiled attitude evolved over the years? What's with all the serial killers in this generation's crime fiction? S.J. Rozan is an award-winning crime novelist, Leonard Cassuto an American literature professor and award-winning critic of crime fiction. Together they will talk about the theory, history, and practice of a genre that is receiving increasing attention from scholars, critics, and readers of all stripes.

Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University, is the author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (2008, Columbia University Press), which was shortlisted for the Edgar and Macavity Awards and named one of the Ten Best Books of 2008 in the crime and mystery category by the Los Angeles Times. Cassuto's articles about American crime fiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, the minnesota review, and other publications. Other books include The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque In American Literature and Culture (1997, Columbia) and three edited volumes. Cassuto is currently finishing work as General Editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel to be published in 2010. He is also an award-winning journalist, writing about subjects ranging from sports to the scientific search for room-temperature semiconductors.

SJ Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of eleven novels. Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story. Bronx Noir (2007, Akashic Books), a short story collection SJ edited, was given the NAIBA "Notable Book of the Year" award. She's served on the National Boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and is ex-President of the Private Eye Writers of America. In January 2003 she was an invited speaker at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The 2005 Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, Texas made her its Guest of Honor. A former architect in a practice that focused on police stations, firehouses, and zoos, SJ Rozan lives in lower Manhattan.


September 25, 2008: Food Writing

This year's Bernheimer symposium featured three events:



February 13, 2008: Johanna Drucker

a printing workshop

Johanna Drucker is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and Professor in the Department of English. In 2000, she helped establish the Speculative Computing Laboratory, a research group dedicated to exploring experimental projects in Humanities Computing. Her recent work focuses on aesthetics and digital media, particularly graphical communication and the expressive character of visual form. She is well known for her publications on the history of written forms, typography, design, and visual poetics. Her critical study, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005 and was followed by a major exhibition of contemporary art at the University of Virginia Art Museum in 2006 titled Complicit! that explored the issues of dialogue between mass media and contemporary art central to Sweet Dreams.

In addition to her scholarly work, Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental visual poet. Her work has been exhibited and collected in special collections in libraries and museums including the Getty Center for the Humanities, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Marvin and Ruth Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, the New York Public Library, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and many others. Her most recent letterpress book, Testament of Women, was produced at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center in 2006. One of her other projects is the development of a networked resource for the study of artists' books, ABsOnline.

"Writing Books: what writers learn from making their work into books" (Listen)

A lunchtime program and discussion co-sponsored by the Common Press and the Fine Arts Program.

"Exquisite Printwork"

A collaborative writing and printing workshop at the Common Press, Morgan building.



January 25, 2007: Marathon reading of Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Cosponsored by the Penn Humanities Forum

Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a rollicking, stream-of-consciousness novel, burst onto the literary scene in 1957, rocketing Kerouac to fame and inspiring a multi-generational obsession with "the road." On the Road, a rapid-fire adventure tale of crossing the country (and back again) solo and with friends, discovering drugs, jazz, and the "bug" of travel, became a benchmark for the Beat Generation. Kerouac wrote the novel in a three-week marathon burst on twelve reams of paper he taped together and referred to as "the scroll." In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the book, and the spirit of the book, the Writers House hosted a marathon reading of our own scroll, featuring local luminary guest readers and accompanied by improvisational jazz musicians.