February 2015

Sunday, 2/1

Monday, 2/2

Writers House Planning Committee Meeting

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: jalowent@writing.upenn.edu

From the time of its founding in 1995-1996, the Kelly Writers House has been run more or less collectively by members of its community. Our original team of intrepid founders—the group of students, faculty, alumni, and staff who wanted to create an independent haven for writers and supporters of contemporary writing in any genre—took for themselves the name “the hub.” “Hub” was the generic term given by Penn's Provost, President, and other planners who hoped that something very innovative would be done at 3805 Locust Walk to prove the viability of the idea that students, working with others, could create an extracurricular learning community around common intellectual and creative passions. To this day, the Writers House Planning Committee refers to itself as “the hub”—the core of engaged faculty, student, staff, and alumni volunteers from whom the House's creative energy and vitality radiates.

Tuesday, 2/3

A poetry reading by Daniel Levin Becker

with Kristen Pearson (C'18) & Kevin Chen

Whenever We Feel Like It series

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event
listen: to an audio recording of this event
listen: to an interview with Daniel Levin Becker conducted by Michelle Taransky in the Wexler Studio

Daniel Levin Becker is the youngest member of the Paris-based literary collective Oulipo. His first book, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, was published by Harvard University Press in 2012. He is also a translator, a music and book critic, and literary editor of The Believer magazine. He lives in San Francisco.

Kristen Pearson is a Freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a poet and aspiring novelist, with a particular interest in the intersections between the sciences and the humanities. Apart from writing, Kristen enjoys drawing, learning foreign languages, and dancing the tango. Her favorite word is "plenilune" and her favorite book is The Iliad.

Kevin Chen is freshman in the College currently considering a double major in Physics and English. He is involved in math tutoring and math lesson planning with Moelis Access Science and interested in further exploring the relationships between math, literature, art, and science during college. He took the Writing by the Numbers seminar because he liked the idea of thinking about the process of creativity and writing in a mathematical context. He says his greatest inspiration for studying science actually came from his literature class when he read an article on seeding the sense of wonder and awe in education. His favorite hobbies include playing the drums and reading popular science books.

Wednesday, 2/4

Emily Nussbaum: Writing about TV

A Povich Journalism Program

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Emily Nussbaum is the TV critic for The New Yorker. She won a 2014 ASME award for her columns and previously worked at New York Magazine, where she created the Approval Matrix.

Thursday, 2/5

Sensible Nonsense

A Creative Ventures Program

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Join us for a celebration of The Sensible Nonsense Project, and help us honor the humor, pathos, and enduring wisdom of children's books! Six speakers will share stories about their own favorite childhood books, what those books taught them, and how those lessons continue to influence their adult lives. And stay on afterward for a delicious reception inspired by after-school snacks, and to get more information about how you, too, can participate in the project. In the meantime, visit The Sensible Nonsense Project at sensiblenonsense.us.

  • Jay Kirk, author of Kingdom Under Glass on Rumpelstiltskin
  • Vikram Paralkar, MD, author of The Afflictions on The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Adam Teterus, Prodigious Point Man of Indy Hall on Harold and the Purple Crayon
  • Jennifer Kobrin, GSE’08, of the Mayor's Commission on Literacy on The Princess Bride
  • Kristie Gadson, C’15 on The Skin I’m In
  • Madeleine Wattenbarger, C’16 on Ramona Quimby
  • Dan Spinelli, C’18 on Where the Wild Things Are

Friday, 2/6

Saturday, 2/7

Sunday, 2/8

Monday, 2/9

CALLING ALL POETS: GRADUATE STUDENT POETRY READING

Ariel Resnikoff, Orchid Tierney, Samantha Pious, and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

From the avant-garde and experimental to the most traditional poetics and translations, Calling All Poets (CAP) brings you a graduate student reading by its workshop participants. Come here the exciting writing being produced by Penn's very own students and maybe even participate in the workshop next year.

Ariel Resnikoff is a poet & translator. His chapbook, Between Shades, came out last May from the Materialist Press. He is currently working on a translation into English of Mikhl Likht's Yiddish long poem, Processions, in collaboration with Stephen Ross & Jerome Rothenberg. He was the recipient of a 2013/14 Dorot Fellowship & began his doctorate in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory at Penn this past fall.

Orchid Tierney is a poet from Aotearoa/New Zealand now residing in Philadelphia. Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012) and The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and she has been published in many journals including Rampike, Brief, and Landfall. She is currently pursing a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more by visiting her website.

Samantha Pious is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in broad!, Lunch Ticket, Amuse-Bouche, Construction, Doublespeak, and Gertrude. Others are available on her website at samanthapious.wordpress.com.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Her poetry has appeared in TriQuarterly, Guernica and Nashville Review, among others. Julia’s first chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, is available from Split LipPress. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction. Learn more by visiting her website.

Tuesday, 2/10

A poetry reading by Bill Berkson

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Charles Bernstein
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher, and sometime curator. Born in New York in 1939, he is the author of many books and pamphlets of poetry, including Serenade; Fugue State, a volume of his 1960s collaborations with Frank O’Hara entitled Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings, the deluxe portfolio Gloria with etchings by Alex Katz, and more recently, Expect Delays (Coffee House Press, 2014), Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems, Goods and Services, and Lady Air. Four recent word-and-image collaborations are BILL with Colter Jacobsen, Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman, Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer, and Repeat After Me with John Zurier. During the 1960s he was an editorial associate at ARTNews, a regular contributor to Arts, guest editor at the Museum of Modern Art, and an associate producer of a program on art for public television, and taught literature and writing workshops at the New School, at Yale University, and in Poets in the Schools programs. After moving to Northern California in 1970, he began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, Artspace, the Poets Foundation, the Fund for Poetry, and the Briarcombe Foundation. He is a corresponding editor for Art in America and has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical He is professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. Books of his criticism include The Sweet Singer of Modernism and Other Art Writings 1985–2003, Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981–2006, and For the Ordinary Artist. He was the Distinguished Paul Mellon Fellow for 2006 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and recipient of the 2010 Balcones Prize for Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

Wednesday, 2/11

Should you get an MFA?

a panel discussion

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Considering an MFA? Join us for a discussion about MFA programs, hosted by Creative Writing faculty member Karen Rile, and featuring a panel of Penn alumni who've attended MFA programs: Julia Bloch, Jamie-Lee Josselyn, John Carroll, and Sanae Lemoine.

Julia Bloch grew up in northern California and Sydney, Australia, and holds an MFA from Mills College and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson (2012), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Allison Corporation, forthcoming in spring 2015. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Aufgabe, How2, The Volta, Journal of Modern Literature, and elsewhere. She is also a co-editor of the poetics journal Jacket2 and has taught literature and creative writing at Bard College and the University of Pennsylvania. She is associate director of the Kelly Writers House.

John Carroll's fiction has appeared in The Citron Review, Big Lucks, Cleaver, Stymie, The Battered Suitcase, Interrobang!?, Versal and Philly Fiction 2 (Don Ron Books). He is one-half of the comedy duo Carroll ünd Klinger. John received his MFA from American University. He currently lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Rachael.

Jamie-Lee Josselyn is the Associate Director for Recruitment at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and is a College House Fellow at Hill House on Penn's campus. She has previously worked at the Kelly Writers House as the Assistant to the Faculty Director and Coordinator of the Writers House Fellows Program. Jamie-Lee has taught creative nonfiction writing at St. Paul’s School’s Advanced Studies Program in Concord, New Hampshire, at the New England Young Writers Conference, and in the Philadelphia public school system and has led book groups for Penn alumni and for prospective students in the Writers House Online Book Groups Program. Her writing has been published in The Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, LOST Magazine, in the six-word memoir anthology It All Changed in an Instant, and elsewhere. Jamie-Lee has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Bennington College where she was the nonfiction editor of The Bennington Review.

Sanaë Lemoine was raised in France and Australia. She received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and studied fiction in the MFA at Columbia, where she teaches an undergraduate essay writing course. She also works as a writing consultant in Columbia’s Writing Center. You will often find Sanaë in her kitchen at work on her novel, cooking, and writing about food at www.petitriz.com.

The Bookternet: Rachel Fershleiser and Maris Kreizman

Applebaum Editors and Publishers series

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
listen: to an interview with Rachel Fershleiser and Maris Kreizman conducted by Arielle Brousse in the Wexler Studio

When Rachel and Maris graduated from Penn in the early 2000s, they thought the only way to build a career in books was the traditional hierarchical climb from editorial assistant to book editor at a big six publishing house. But the industry is changing, and both have embraced internet tools and communities to forge unique careers they couldn't have imagined.

Join us for a panel moderated by KWH's Arielle Brousse to hear how they used a love of books and web culture to get book deals, jobs at top tech start ups, and more!

Rachel Fershleiser works on Tumblr’s outreach team, specializing in publishing, nonprofit, and cultural organizations. Previously she was the community manager at Bookish and the director of public programs at Housing Works Bookstore Café, where she now serves on the board of directors. She is also the co-creator of Six-Word Memoirs and co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning and three other books. Her Kickstarter campaign for Stock Tips: A Zine about Soup earned 13 times its initial funding goal. Flavorwire named her one of The 35 Writers Who Run the Literary Internet and Betabeat named her one of The Most Poachable Players in Tech. Here she is talking about The Bookternet at TEDx.

Maris Kreizman is the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a blog and soon-to-be book (Flatiron Books, 2015) that celebrates the intersection of her two great loves—literature and TV. She’s currently a publishing specialist at Kickstarter. A former book editor, Maris cannot get enough of critiquing her own writing.

Thursday, 2/12

7-Up on Rush

A Creative Ventures Program

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

The 7-Up series is an annual program for which we invite seven guests to speak for seven minutes each about a topic. Each speaker gives their insight on some aspect of the chosen theme; interesting interpretations and musings always result!

Video recording of this event and others in the 7-Up series can be found here.

Friday, 2/13

Saturday, 2/14

Sunday, 2/15

Monday, 2/16

A reading by Anne Waldman

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM

RSVP required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Waldman is the author of more than forty books, including Fast Speaking Woman, Vow to Poetry, and several selected editions of poetry, including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence; Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble; Manatee/Humanity; and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. Waldman was a founder and director of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church in-the-Bowery and co-founded, with Allen Ginsberg, the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Waldman is a distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa; she also has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria; has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice; was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in New York City; and is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, in addition to recently being appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Waldman divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

Tuesday, 2/17

A conversation with Anne Waldman

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

10:00 AM

RSVP required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Waldman is the author of more than forty books, including Fast Speaking Woman, Vow to Poetry, and several selected editions of poetry, including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence; Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble; Manatee/Humanity; and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. Waldman was a founder and director of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church in-the-Bowery and co-founded, with Allen Ginsberg, the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Waldman is a distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa; she also has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria; has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice; was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in New York City; and is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, in addition to recently being appointed a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Waldman divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

Wednesday, 2/18

FEMINISM/S

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Our Feminism/s series explores contemporary feminist practice and theory by featuring talks and presentations by writers, artists, activists, and other people working in a feminist mode.

Feminista Jones is a mental health social worker, author, community activist, and sex-positive Black feminist woman from New York City. She is an award-winning writer and blogger who focuses on health and well-being, specifically in areas of mental health, sexual health, and physical health. She is currently the Love & Sex section editor at BlogHer.com and the former sex columnist at Ebony.com. She co-hosts a sex-positive feminist podcast called This Week In Blackness: After Dark, which discusses topics related to sex and sexuality, race, and feminism. Feminista has been featured in several online publications, notably as a contributor to Salon.com, TIME.com, columnist at Ebony.com, and has been syndicated in TheRoot.com and TheGriot.com.

Feminista has been regularly featured on Huffingpost Live, has appeared on the Dr. Oz Show and the Exhale Show, and her work has been featured on C-SPAN and MSNBC. In 2013, Feminista was selected as a United Nations Foundation Fellow for her dynamic social media influence. In 2014, she launched a global anti-street harassment campaign (#YouOKSis) and a National Moment of Silence protesting police brutality (#NMOS14), both of which received international media attention. For this work, she was awarded the 2014 Black Weblog Award for Outstanding Online Activism. Feminista has presented at various conferences at universities and, n 2014, she was honored as one of the Top 100 Black Social Influencers by The Root. Feminista is a mom and she doesn’t sleep.

Thursday, 2/19

A conversation with Daily News Cartoonist Signe Wilkinson

Co-sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program and The Alice Paul Center and The Povich Journalism Fund

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by Dick Polman
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Signe Wilkinson is an editorial cartoonist best known for her work at the Philadelphia Daily News. Wilkinson is the first female cartoonist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning (1992) and was once named "the Pennsylvania state vegetable substitute" by the former speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She served as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists from 1994-1995. In 2005 she published a collection of her work entitled One Nation, Under Surveillance. In 2007, Wilkinson began a syndicated daily comic strip, Family Tree, for United Media. She decided to end the strip in August 2011, with the last strip appearing on August 27. In 2011, Wilkinson received a Visionary Woman Award from Moore College of Art & Design.

Signe Wilkinson is the 2015 Judith Roth Berkowitz Lecturer in Women's Studies. She will speak on 'Redrawing Stereotypes: Cartooning in Our Charlie Hebdo World' at 5:00pm on Thursday, February 19 in Cafe 58, Irvine Auditorium. All are welcome. For more information see: this link Our website has the same blurb that you use in your announcement, but it also links to Signe's website (and also of course gets people on to our website :).

Language Matters

screening & discussion with Bob Holman

Rothstein Oral Poetry Program

5:00 PM (time may change)

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

There are over 6000 languages remaining in the world. We lose one every two weeks. Hundreds will be lost within the next generation. By the end of this century, half of the world’s languages will have vanished. In January 2015, Language Matters airs on PBS, a two hour documentary that asks: What do we lose when a language dies? What does it take to save a language? Language Matters was filmed around the world: on a remote island off the coast of Australia, where 400 Aboriginal people speak 10 different languages, all at risk; in Wales, where Welsh, once in danger, is today making a comeback; and in Hawaii, where Hawaiians are fighting to save their native tongue. “Most people know that we are losing species,” says Bob Holman, a poet widely known for his expertise in oral traditions. “Ask schoolchildren, and they’ll know about the panda or the orchid – they’ll have done a project on it. But ask someone if they know that languages all over the world are dying, maybe one in ten might.”

Friday, 2/20

Saturday, 2/21

Sunday, 2/22

Monday, 2/23

LIVE at the Writers House

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the people of Kelly Writers House and WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc. For more information, contact Producer Alli Katz (katza@writing.upenn.edu).

Tuesday, 2/24

A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL MENAKER

Kauders Lunch Series

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Hosted by: Beth Kephart

Daniel Menaker is a fiction writer and editor, currently working with the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and as a consultant for Barnes & Noble Bookstores. Daniel was a fiction editor at The New Yorker for twenty years and had material published in the magazine frequently. In 1995 he was hired by Random House as Senior Literary Editor and later became Executive Editor-in-Chief.

MIXTAPE POETRY PROJECT

Beltran Family Program

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Michelle Taransky, winner of the 2014-15 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring, invited 14 community members to select poems for four limited-edition “mixtape” collections of writing. Printed on 4"x 2.65" sheets of paper and collected into plastic cassette cases, each mixtape collection will feature a cover designed by KWH Program Coordinator Alli Katz, a track-list of poems, and tiny poem broadsides designed by Alison Sonnenschein. The event will feature readings by participants, including: Lily Applebaum, Halla Bearden, Victoria Ford, Elan Kiderman, Peter Laberge, Nadia Laher, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Kenna O’Rourke, Sam Prieto, Rosa Escandon, Henry Steinberg, Hannah Van Sciver, Madeleine Wattenbarger, and Connie Yu.

Wednesday, 2/25

Speakeasy open mic night

7:30 PM

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Our Speakeasy Open Mic Night welcomes all kinds of readings, spectacles, and happenings. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your award-winning essay, or your stand up comedy to share. Expect fantastic performances, occasional costumes, and, of course, community members who love writing.

Thursday, 2/26

A reading by novelist Tom McCarthy

Writers Without Borders

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Kenneth Goldsmith

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema. His third, C, which explores the relationship between melancholia and technological media, was a finalist in the 2010 Booker Prize. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books; of the novel Men in Space, set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the collapse of communism; and of numerous essays that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In addition, he is founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers and artists whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Palais de Tokyo Paris, Tate Britain and Moderna Museet Stockholm. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University. His latest novel, Satin Island, is published in February 2015.

Friday, 2/27

YOUR LANGUAGE — MY EAR: RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN POETS AT CLOSE QUARTERS

4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Co-sponsored by: Writers Without Borders, The Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Mellon Cross-Cultural Grants
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

This reading is the culmination of an intensive collaboration between Russian and American poets. Featured writers include:

  • Keti Chukhrov (Moscow)
  • Alexander Skidan (St. Petersburg)
  • Alexandra Petrova (Rome)
  • Shamshad Abdullaev (Tashkent)
  • Polina Barskova (USA)
  • Charles Bernstein (USA)
  • Bob Perelman (USA)
  • Julia Bloch (USA)
  • Julia Dasbach (USA)

Saturday, 2/28

A conversation with Questlove

Blutt Symposium

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Born in Pennsylvania in 1971, Ahmir Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, is the drummer and co-founder of hip-hop/neo-soul group the Roots. In addition to helping create the neo-soul movement, Questlove is known for his work on such groundbreaking hip-hop albums as Things Fall Apart (1999) and Phrenology (2002). Since 2008, he has come to popular acclaim as part of the house band for the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon talk show.