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September 2009

Tuesday, 9/1

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 9/2

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 9/3

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 9/4

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 9/5

NSO Speakeasy: poetry, prose, anything goes

9:30 PM in the Garden

The annual NSO Speakeasy takes a moonlit twist this year as we welcome new students to the Writers House community for a late-night open mic session under the stars. Come to perform or just to listen!

Sunday, 9/6

Monday, 9/7

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/8

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 9/9

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 9/10

Open House

5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

The Kelly Writers House Open House is an opportunity for new and old students to explore the House for the first time, meet community members and student leaders, and learn about ways to get involved in literary magazines, literacy outreach, writing groups, poetry readings, and more. Meet representatives from the KWH Planning Committee (the Hub), the Common Press, F-Word, Penn Review, Penn Appetit, The Green Couch, First Call, and WriteOn!, among others.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 9/11

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 9/12

POETRY READING FEATURING DARA WIER AND BEN KOPEL WITH JAMES LA MARRE

presented by the Whenever We Feel Like It series

2:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

listen: to an audio recording of this event
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to individual files for each reader on PennSound's Whenever We Feel Like It series page

The Whenever We Feel Like It reading series is put on by Committee of Vigilance members Michelle Taransky and Emily Pettit. The Committee of Vigilance is a subdivision of Sleepy Lemur Quality Enterprises, which is the production division of The Meeteetzee Institute.




Dara Weir
Ben Kopel


Dara Wier was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Wave Books just published her Selected Poems. Other recent books include Remnants of Hannah and Reverse Rapture (awarded the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives Book Award). Wier's poems can be found in Pushcart, Best American Poetry, Norton, Soft Skull and various other anthologies, and in American Poetry Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, slope, Turnrow, New American Review, and Volt. The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American Poetry Review have supported her work. She's a member of the poetry faculty and director of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. With Guy Pettit and Emily Pettit, she edits and publishes chapbooks and broadsides for Factory Hollow Press.

Ben Kopel is a Baton Rouge, LA native and holds degrees from Louisiana State University and the University of Iowa. He is currently continuing his education at UMASS Amherst. He enjoys movies about summer jobs and thinks there should be more movies about lonesome hitmen.

James La Marre is an east coast native cultured in Salt Lake City and currently resides in Philadelphia. An undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, James works at the Kelly Writers House and spent the past summer interning at the Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn. He likes having things to look forward to.

Sunday, 9/13

Monday, 9/14

A meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (the "Hub")

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

RSVP: to gautsche@writing.upenn.edu

Join us for pizza and a discussion of upcoming projects. Any Penn-affiliated person (student, staff member, faculty) is welcome to join the Writers House Planning Committee. At this first meeting of the year we will discuss ways you can get involved -- from literacy outreach to food writing.

Go here to get a sense of what we do; go here for sound clips and photos from our end-of-year party; go here for a list of campus publications.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/15

A Poetry Reading by Patrick Pritchett and Dan Featherston

presented by the Emergency Poetry Series

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

listen: to an audio recording of this event
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to individual files for each reader on PennSound's Emergency Reading Page

Dan Featherston is the author of The Radiant World (BlazeVox, 2009), The Clock Maker's Memoir (Cuneiform Press, 2007), United States (Factory School, 2005), and Into the Earth (Quarry Press, 2005), as well as several chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Aufgabe, Kiosk, Mandorla, New American Writing, and Sulfur. Scholarly works have appeared most recently in Modernism/Modernity, Chicago Review, and Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose. While living in Tucson, Arizona, Featherston help found POG, a collective of artists and scholars engaged with avant-garde work in a variety of media, and from 2001 to 2004, he edited A.BACUS, a journal of poetry and translation. Featherston has taught composition, literature, and creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, and he is currently a lecturer in the English department at Temple University. He lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their companion animals Fredo, Mazzy, and Itze.

Patrick Pritchett is the author of Burn - Doxology for Joan of Arc, and the chapbooks Reside, Lives of the Poets and Antiphonal. His poems have appeared in New American Writing, Hambone, Shiny, Bombay Gin, New Review of Literature, Colorado Review and The Modern Review, among others. Articles and reviews on modern and contemporary poetry have been featured in American Book Review, Rain Taxi, English Language Notes and Jacket. Scholarly work has been published in Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works. A former story analyst and script editor in the film business, where he worked for James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, and HBO, Pritchett has taught modern literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Naropa University, and Boston University. Currently he is a Lecturer in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 9/16

A Celebration of 3808: A Journal of Critical Writing

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the Critical Writing Program
listen: to an audio recording of this event
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Each semester, instructors teaching Critical Writing seminars across a wide range of disciplines at the University of Pennsylvania nominate the best essay written by an undergraduate in their class. A faculty editorial board selects essays from among the nominees to publish in 3808: A Journal of Critical Writing. A student editorial board selects the best essay in the collection as the winner of the Henry LaBarre Jayne Essay Prize.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 9/17

Reading and Launch Party for Penn Review

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Devoted to the literary and visual arts, Penn Review is the premier mainstream magazine on Penn's campus, publishing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and other original literary works. They also feature all forms of visual art, including including documentation of 3-D, time-based, and site-specific work. To find out more, email pennreview@gmail.com.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 9/18

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 9/19

Sunday, 9/20

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Monday, 9/21

LIVE at the Writers House

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Michaela Majoun
produced by: Erin Gautsche
listen: to an audio recording of this event

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


Katherine Bode-Lang
Suzie Brown
Deborah Burnham
Harry Humes
Lisa Sewell

Katherine Bode-Lang holds an MFA from Penn State University, where she now teaches. Her chapbook, Spring Melt, which won second place in the Keystone Chapbook Contest, was published this May by Seven Kitchens Press. Her poems have appeared in Subtropics, Mid-American Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among others. She was an Editor's Choice for Mid-American Review's James Wright Poetry Award in 2007 and 2008, and she received Academy of American Poets Prizes three times from Penn State and Hope College. A native of Michigan and former resident of Tucson, Arizona, she lives in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Andrew.

Singer, songwriter and cardiologist Suzie Brown started writing songs in June 2008 and is already taking the circuit in and around Philadelphia by storm. Within months of her first major gig at an October Fest celebration, she was playing sold out shows, and opening for the likes of Livingston Taylor and Lyle Lovett. Eager to not lose her musical side after graduating, she bought a guitar started teaching herself to play, and even attended the Berklee School of Music Summer Performance Camp during the summer before medical school. She spent the next several years torn between music and medicine. An impromptu musical opportunity happened at a wedding during which Brown sang the John Prine song "Angel From Montgomery" and the room fell silent. A New York show biz rep in the audience told her to call if she ever wanted to sing professionally. The seed was planted, and a couple weeks later her first song came pouring out. Six months after writing her first song, she played eleven shows in one month. These days, Brown has the best of both worlds. She works part time as a physician, which she still loves. But she savors the moment, halfway through the week, when she can trade in her stethoscope for a six string.

Deborah Burnham is a lecturer and advisor in the English department, teaching courses in the essay, gender studies, and American fiction (both novels and short stories). She also teaches poetry and poetry writing, with a particular interest in formal poems and in the history of women's poetry. She created a freshman seminar on Philadelphia poetry to introduce the lively poetic culture of the city to new students. She teaches for the Master of Liberal Arts Program in the College of General Studies, offering courses in the British and American bildungsroman, the development of the short story and the literature of aging. She received her Ph.D. in Modern British and American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She directed the University Scholars Program and later was an Assistant Dean in the College Advising Office. For over twenty summers, she directed and taught in the creative writing program at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. Texas Tech University Press published her book, Anna and the Steel Mill, as its First Book Prize winner in 1995. Her second book, Jazz in the All-Night Laundromat, is in circulation. She has just finished a novel, Raising June, a female bildungsroman set in the Viet Nam era. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry. She has lived in the Powelton neighborhood of Philadelphia for over twenty-five years and is currently a member of the executive board of the the Powelton Village Civic Association. An enthusiastic gardener, she has created several small gardens on Philadelphia streets, most notably near the Irongate Theater at 37th and Chestnut Street.

Harry Humes' most recent books of poetry are The Bottomland (1995), and August Evening with Trumpet (2004), both published by the University of Arkansas Press; Butterfly Effect, a National Poetry Series selection in 1998, was published in that year by Milkweed Editions; and Underground Singing, Seven Kitchens press, 2007. His first book of poems, Winter Weeds, the Devins Award selection in 1983, was published in 1983 by the University of Missouri press. He is a recipient of a National Endowment to the Arts Fellowship in poetry and several Pennsylvania Council on the Arts poetry grants. Poetry Northwest awarded him its Theodore Roethke Poetry Award, and his poem "Butterfly Effect," originally published in the Gettysburg Revie, was selected by James Tate for the Best American Poetry of 1997.

Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out (Alice James Books), Name Withheld (Four Way Books) and Long Corridor (Seven Kitchens Press), which won the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Award. She is also co-editor with Claudia Rankine of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan UP). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Recent work is appearing or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Tampa Review, American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly and The Journal. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/22

A poetry reading by Kathleen Fraser

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Michelle Taransky
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: a recording of this reading on Fraser's PennSound author page

Photo: Jeannette Montgomery Barron

Kathleen Fraser's sixteen books of poems include W I T N E S S, with mixed media work by Nancy Tokar Miller (2007, Chax); Discreet Categories Forced Into Coupling (2004, Apogee), and the collaged text hi dde violeth i dde violet (2004). Her collected essays, Translating the Unspeakable, Poetry and the Innovative Necessity appeared in 2000, as part of the Contemporary Poetics Series, University Alabama Press; her Selected Poems, (1970-1995) was published by Wesleyan University Press. Other artist collaborations include books with Sam Francis, Mary Ann Hayden and David Marshall. Twenty wall texts from ii ss, with images by NY painter Hermine Ford, were recently shown at the Pratt Institute of Architecture in Rome and at Melville House (Dumbo/Brooklyn). Fraser has taught for five autumns in the graduate writing program at California College of the Arts/SF and lives in Rome each spring, translating Italian poets and lecturing widely on American poetry. She is winner of a Guggenheim and two N.E.A writing fellowships, founder of The American Poetry Archives and publisher/editor of the journal HOW(ever) and its on-line version, HOW2.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 9/23

Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Speakeasy is an open mic night held at the Kelly Writers House every other Wednesday evening. It's an opportunity for writers to share their work, or the work of others, in a friendly setting. Speakeasy was founded in 1997 and continues to be an important part of the regular Writers House programming series. We welcome poets, storytellers, singers, musicians, and anything in between to share their voices with us in the Arts Cafe twice a month. As always: Poetry, prose, anything goes!

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 9/24

Theorizing Presents Heather Love

"Life Outside: On the Descriptive Turn in Literature and Sociology"

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Heather Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007). She has published widely on gender studies and queer theory, modernism and modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, and critical theory. She is the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?") and is currently at work on a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies devoted to the work of anthropologist Gayle Rubin. Her current research concerns the literary source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 sociological classic, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity ("The Stigma Archive").


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 9/25

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 9/26

Sunday, 9/27

A short film screening

Homegrown is Best

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the School of Design

Have you been curious about what goes on inside the creative crucible known as the Addams Hall DVLab? Every semester approximately 110 students engage in Digital Video Production classes at The School of Design to produce video work ranging from documentary to short narrative to experimental music videos. Two hours of our BEST work from Spring '09 will be screened at The Kelly Writers House. Come—be inspired, be proud, be entertained, be amazed to see what one semester of video production in the DVLab looks like! Syllabi and assignment descriptions will be on hand, as will Ellen Reynolds (School of Design Instructor/Post Production Supervisor).

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Monday, 9/28

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 9/29

KWH ART opening for Poem Posters: An Exhibition of Broadsides & Indie Press Festival

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe and Dining Room



In conjunction with the broadside exhibition Poem Posters, comprising letterpress work from small printshops around the country, KWH Art will present a small press fair to showcase a number of press projects from San Francisco to Brooklyn. There will be a selection of complimentary printed matter and a limited edition of take-away posters for the show. A reception will follow.

Poem Posters presses include:

Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn, NY

The Common Press of Philadelphia, PA

Littoral Press of Oakland, CA

Dead Skin Press of Portland, ME

Hermetic Press of Minneapolis, MN

New Lights Press of Oakland, CA

Phylum Press of New Haven, CT

Propolis Press of Northamton, MA

Axel & Otto of San Francisco, CA

Intima Press of New York, NY

Auto Types Press of New York, NY

C&C Press of Pajaro, CA

Punch Press of Buffalo, NY

Poltroon Press of Berkeley, CA

Small Fires Press of Memphis, TN


*The exhibition's title is borrowed from Charles Henri Ford's short experimental film featuring (and named after) his 1965 "Poem Posters" exhibition at New York's Cordier & Ekstrom gallery.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 9/30

A lunch discussion with Pete Dexter

presented by the Sylvia Kauders lunch series

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Dick Polman
rsvp: to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM
listen: to an audio recording of this event
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Pete Dexter, a Michigan native, is an author and former columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and The Sacramento Bee. As a fiction writer, his works include 1988 National Book Award winner Paris Trout (1988, Random House) and 1996 Literary Award recipient The Paperboy (1996, Dell Publishing). He has also written screenplays for Paris Trout, Rush, Michael, and Mulholland Falls. He currently resides in the Puget Sound region of Washington.

A poetry reading by Daniel Hoffman

celebrating The Whole Nine Yards

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
introduced by: Greg Djanikian


Daniel Hoffman taught at Penn for twenty-six years, heading the Writing Program and giving seminars in modern poets and American literature. He retired as Felix Schelling Professor Emeritus in 1993; since then he has often appeared in programs at Kelly Writers House. Hoffman's thirteenth book of verse, The Whole Nine Yards; Longer Poems (April 2009) has been given the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award by its publisher, L.S.U. Press. Hoffman served as Poet Laureate in 1973-74, the appointment then called Consultant in Poetry of The Library of Congress. His first book, An Armada of Thirty Whales, was W. H. Auden's choice for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1954. Among his dozen subsequent volumes are Brotherly Love, a finalist in 1981 for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Beyond Silence; Selected Shorter Poems 1948-2003; and Makes You Stop and Thank; Sonnets (2005). Best known of his critical studies is another National Book Award finalist, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. He has recently received the Aiken-Taylor Award for Contemporary Poetry and, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Arthur Rense Award for "a distinctive poet."


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)