Playwright Edward Albee to Visit as 2011 Kelly Writers House Fellow
University of Pennsylvania Almanac
March 15, 2011
Playwright Edward Albee will visit the University of Pennsylvania next Monday and Tuesday, March 21-22, as one of three acclaimed writers selected to be Spring 2011 Kelly Writers House Fellows. Mr. Albee will give evening readings and informal teaching sessions with young writers as well as aspiring writers.
Last month non-fiction writer Susan Cheever was at Penn. Next month poetry critic Marjorie Perloff will visit campus April 25-26.
Mr. Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, has been hailed by the New Yorker as "the greatest living playwright." He is perhaps best known for his dramatic play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It won both the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle awards. Mr. Albee's other plays include The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance, Seascape, Three Tall Women and the Tony-winning The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia. He is a Kennedy Center Honoree, was awarded the National Medal of Arts and received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre.
Each Fellow's visit begins with an evening reading at 6:30 p.m. on Monday at Kelly Writers House, followed the next morning at 10 a.m. by a brunch and a public interview/conversation. Attendance is by reservation, which is required to attend each program and participate in webcasts. Contact Jamie-Lee Josselyn at (215) 573-9749 or whfellow@writing.upenn.edu. All events are free and open to the public.
Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables the KWH to realize two unusual goals. "We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction—more honored in practice than in theory—between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other," said Dr. Al Filreis, Kelly Professor and Writers House Faculty Director.
Both programs will be broadcast live worldwide on KWH-TV and will be recorded for Writers House digital archives on the KWH website.
The course is taught by Dr. Filreis. This year's coordinator of the program is Jamie-Lee Josselyn.
More information is available on the KWH website at http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/