Is the Kelly Writers House unique?
Yes, but here are other centers for writers that strike us as similar in one respect or another:
- Philadelphia Alumni Writers House at Franklin & Marshall College. Founded by former Kelly Writers House Director Kerry Sherin Wright.
- Writers' House at Northwest College. ("The Writers' House, like the other Northwest College theme houses, consists of adjacent duplexes, three or four bedrooms each, at Northwest's Trapper Village West. Men and women are housed separately. Writers' House participants work closely and collaboratively with students in the Art House program; there are currently 11 students in the combined Art/Writers complex.")
- Jimenez-Porter Writers' House at the University of Maryland (A house on campus for writers with an emphasis on foreign languages.)
- The Writers' Center at Indiana (The Writers' Center of Indiana is the only comprehensive community-based literary arts organization in Indiana. Our mission is to nurture a writing community, to support established and emerging writers, to improve written and verbal communication, and to develop an audience for literature in Indiana. For 20 years, The Writers' Center has offered a wide range of classes, workshops, services and public events to diverse ethnic and cultural segments of our community. The WCI serves both emerging writers, and advanced writers of local, regional and national acclaim. The Writers' Center Press has published many fine volumes of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction by many of Indiana's finest authors. The Writers' Center reached a critical turning point in July 1999 when the founder/director retired. This change created an opportunity for a strategic restructuring of the organization, using a progressive arts business model. A newly expanded Board of Directors with vision, imagination, and valuable community contacts started in February 2000 to reinvent the character and life of the organization. Our goal is to serve Indiana by making The Writers' Center of Indiana one of the premiere literary arts organizations in the nation.)
- The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the School of English, Queen's University, Belfast. Poet Peter Middleton, after visiting the Writers House, knew that we would be able to advise Ciaran Carson, then newly appointed Director of the nascent Heaney Centre.
- The Writers House at Rutgers-Camden is in the planning stages. The creators are modeling this project explicitly on the Kelly Writers House: "The Writers House proposed below is modeled on the successful Kelly Writers House on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1995. After less than ten years of development, the Kelly Writers House hosts about 150 programs per year, most of them free and open to the public. The house serves as a community-building tool on the campus and helps to connect the campus to the surrounding metropolitan area. Though many of its events are of particular interest to creative writers, it serves all of the academic disciplines on campus, and also provides space for tutoring, workshops, and counseling on subjects of general interest. It is supported in part by the University of Pennsylvania, but also through external grants and a large group of Friends, who contribute $40 per year and are recognized in its annual publication. The Camden Writers House will of course be adapted to meet the specific needs and opportunities presented by Rutgers University-Camden and the City of Camden. Like the Kelly House, it will offer public programs and workshops that will be open to the campus and the general public."