April 2026
Wednesday, 4/1/2026
Thursday, 4/2/2026
Friday, 4/3/2026
Saturday, 4/4/2026
Sunday, 4/5/2026
Monday, 4/6/2026
A Meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee
5:30 PM in person
Join us for a meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (also known as "the Hub") — the core group of engaged students, staff, faculty, and volunteers who help make things happen at Writers House. Anyone is welcome to become a Hub member by participating in Hub activities and helping out. Members of the Hub plan programs, share ideas, and discuss upcoming projects.
Tuesday, 4/7/2026
Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone
A screening and conversation with filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal
Hartman Screenwriting Symposium
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Jake Marmer and Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit and Stone is an in-progress feature documentary about iconic Berkeley street poet Julia Vinograd, who emerged from the 1960’s Free Speech Movement fighting state oppression with bubbles instead of bricks. Eccentric and indomitable, often subsisting on one meal a day, the "Bubble Lady of Telegraph Avenue" pushed through multiple disabilities to produce more than 70 volumes of poetry, winning an American Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Berkeley's first Lifetime Achievement Award. A lifelong champion of marginalized people and an enduring symbol of nonviolent resistance through art, Vinograd's untold story is presented through the vivid historical prisms of Berkeley's People's Park movement, the 1980's post-Beat Bay Area literary scene, and her witty, incisive, deeply humane poetry. Julia's story of indefatigable artistry and unabashed nonconformity highlights the creativity that can emerge from difference, and asks viewers to understand that difference is intrinsic to our humanity. www.betweenspiritandstonethefilm.com
Ken Paul Rosenthal makes lyrical, character-driven documentary films that explore the spectrum of difference and enrich the world with kindness and compassion. His work has screened widely at national and international film festivals and venues. Ken is the recipient of numerous festival awards, a Kodak Cinematography Award, the Berkeley Film Foundation’s Al Bendich Award, a University Film & Video Association Award, and a California Humanities Documentary Grant. His Mad Dance Mental Health Film Trilogy circulates in over 400 academic and public libraries, screened at 74 film festivals, and has been presented in person at hundreds of universities, mental health symposia, peer support networks, and community events worldwide. In his spare time, Ken stages an emotional wellness pop-up, Your Empathy Stand (Y.E.S.) in public parks, freely offering active listening to one and all. www.kenpaulrosenthal.com
Wednesday, 4/8/2026
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
Poetry, prose, anything goes
7:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings and performances. A sign-up sheet will be available when you arrive and you’ll have three minutes at the podium to perform. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, your award-winning essay, or your flash fiction to share – or just come to celebrate your classmates, colleagues, and fellow writers.
Thursday, 4/9/2026
Friday, 4/10/2026
Saturday, 4/11/2026
Sunday, 4/12/2026
Monday, 4/13/2026
Poet Evie Schockley
Brave Testimony Poetry Series
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Poet & literary scholar EVIE SHOCKLEY thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we, semiautomatic, and the new black. Her work has garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award twice and been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She publishes nationally and internationally, and has been translated into French, Polish, Slovenian, and Spanish. Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Tuesday, 4/14/2026
Wednesday, 4/15/2026
Speculative Fiction as Truth-Telling
Alex Smith and Margaret Killjoy in conversation with Abbey Mei Otis
Lucid Fiction Program
6:00 PM in person
co-sponsored by: the Beltran Family Award, Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts, and Wolf Humanities Center
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for an evening with speculative fiction writers Alex Smith (Arkdust, Black Vans) and Margaret Killjoy (The Sapling Cage, We Won't Be Here Tomorrow). Each author will share their work and join in conversation on the role of the literature of the imagination--fantasy, science fiction, Afrofuturism, magical realism--in speaking urgent truths and holding up a mirror to society. As Ursula LeGuin said, "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now -- the realists of a larger reality." The evening is hosted by Abbey Mei Otis, Penn Artist-in-Residence and author of Alien Virus Love Disaster.
Thursday, 4/16/2026
Friday, 4/17/2026
Saturday, 4/18/2026
Sunday, 4/19/2026
Monday, 4/20/2026
Tuesday, 4/21/2026
To See Beyond
Anna Badkhen in conversation with Christopher Rogers
6:00 PM in person
co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Please join us for a celebration of Anna Badkhen's extraordinary new essay collection, To See Beyond, about which Ben Fountain has written: "Anna Badkhen’s lifetime of deep reading and dangerous living has yielded these profoundly moving essays that range from Canary Islands myth to hunger stones, from ‘radical hope’ and child soldiers to micro-love and prayer beads and a lifejacket graveyard on Lesvos.” The evening will be hosted by educator and cultural worker Christopher R. Rogers.
Anna Badkhen is the author of eight books. Her essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award and for the 2023 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. Her new essay collection, To See Beyond, is being published by Bellevue Literary Press in April 2026. Badkhen’s awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. A former war correspondent, Badkhen has essays in New York Review of Books, Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Emergence, Orion, Adi, and the New York Times, and fiction in AGNI, The Common, Conjunctions, Scalawag, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Zyzzyva. Badkhen grew up in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Christopher Rogers PhD (UPenn GSE '23) started We Win from Within in June 2023 as an educator and cultural worker from Chester, PA, with more than a decade of experience in supporting justice-oriented arts, culture, and community in the Greater Philadelphia area. He currently coordinates the Friends of the Tanner House, incubating a revitalized Henry Ossawa Tanner House at the intersection of Black heritage preservation and community cultural organizing. As a facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction, he supports aspiring movement leaders serving communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration. He’s previously coedited How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black UprisingMy City Need Something, a portraits and prose collaboration with photographer Karim Brown (Common Notions, 2026).
Wednesday, 4/22/2026
Thursday, 4/23/2026
Friday, 4/24/2026
Saturday, 4/25/2026
Sunday, 4/26/2026
Monday, 4/27/2026
A READING BY AYANA MATHIS
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Ayana Mathis's first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica, and Rolling Stone. Mathis has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and the American Academy in Berlin. She was the first Black woman to be a permanent member of the faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and has taught in MFA Programs at Columbia University and Rutgers. She currently hosts and curates the Black Arts Dialogues series, a conversation series centered around art and Blackness hosted by the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department at Columbia University, and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College.
Tuesday, 4/28/2026
A Conversation with AYANA MATHIS
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Ayana Mathis's first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica, and Rolling Stone. Mathis has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and the American Academy in Berlin. She was the first Black woman to be a permanent member of the faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and has taught in MFA Programs at Columbia University and Rutgers. She currently hosts and curates the Black Arts Dialogues series, a conversation series centered around art and Blackness hosted by the African American and African Diasporic Studies Department at Columbia University, and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College.