October 2024
Tuesday, 10/1
Wednesday, 10/2
Thursday, 10/3
Friday, 10/4
Saturday, 10/5
Sunday, 10/6
Monday, 10/7
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend 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, 10/8
Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers
Brodsky Gallery event
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
This performance and discussion coincides with a Brodsky Gallery installation of work from Upstage (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), a book in which words by Bruce Andrews and visuals by Sally Silvers combine to explore distinctive looks, textures, and language of pandemic-era Asbury Park, NJ.
Poet, performance writer, poetics theorist, sound designer, & retired social scientist, Bruce Andrews was born in Chicago, earned a BA and MA from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD from Harvard. He moved to New York City in 1975, where he taught Political Science & Political Economy at Fordham in the Bronx (specializing in U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, covert activity, cultural studies & the JFK assassination) for the next 37 years. Closely associated with the post-1970s experimental literary movement, so-called Language Poetry, he coedited the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Charles Bernstein. He has published 30+ books including Edge, Film Noir, Wobbling R + B, Love Songs, Give Em Enough Rope, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened), I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut up, or Social Romanticism, Tizzy Boost, EX WHY ZEE, Lip Service, Designated Heartbeat, Swoon Noir, You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, A Change Is Gonna Come, & The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman. His essays on literary theory & poetics are collected in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Long involved in collaborative multi-media projects — including the performance group Barking (started with Sally Silvers & Tom Cora), staging large cast theater/performance spectacles in the 1980s — for decades he has been Sally Silvers Dancers’ main music/sound collaborator — composer,sound designer, & improvising music mixes & editing texts live in performance.
Sally Silvers is an award winning choreographer who also has published articles, essays, and poems in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies. She continues to have an on-going fascination with the poetic as well as the social meanings of movement, offering a no-holds- barred exploration of movement possibilities often tilted toward the eccentric, awkward, and unexpected. Silvers has performed in South Korea, London, Puerto Rico, France, Mexico, Berlin, Sweden, and Denmark, at the Joyce Theater, and many other national and international venues. She was a core member of the faculty at Bennington College Summer Choreography Project for 5 years and a guest teacher at the European Dance Development Center in Holland for a decade. She is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & is known for several community curatorial projects including TalkTalkWalkWalk (combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of “live choreography’ – starting a new dance live in front of the audience on the spot).. From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer. She has been collaborating with poet/writer/sound designer Bruce Andrews since the early 1980s. For more information visit SallySilversDance.com.
Wednesday, 10/9
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, performances, spectacles, and happenings. 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.
Thursday, 10/10
Friday, 10/11
Saturday, 10/12
Sunday, 10/13
Monday, 10/14
Tuesday, 10/15
On Dictée
Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, Elizabeth Kim, Jena Osman, Syd Zolf, and moderator Jo Park
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for an appreciation of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée. Jo Park will host a gathering of local poets and scholars — Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, Elizabeth Kim, Jena Osman, and Syd Zolf — who will each riff on a single passage from Cha's epic. Let's see where our improvisations take us, and we'll invite you to add yours!
Julia Bloch is the author of Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem and three books of poetry, including Letters to Kelly Clarkson. She is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Laynie Browne's recent books include: Everyone & Her Resemblances, Practice Has No Sequel, Intaglio Daughters, and Letters Inscribed in Snow. She edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel and co-edited I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Honors include a Pew Fellowship and the National Poetry Series Award. She teaches and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at University of Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Kim is an Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College. She earned her PhD in English Literature from Temple University and her MFA in Poetry from the Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. Her article, “‘Crammed with Tongues’: Cosmopolitan Creole in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution” is forthcoming in College Literature. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Platform Review, The Stillwater Review, The Waiting Room Reader, and American Book Review.
Josephine Nock-Hee Park is School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves on the Steering Committee of the Asian American Studies Program and the Executive Committee of the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies. Her books include Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford, 2008) and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford, 2016), and her most recent title is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Black and White (Cambridge Elements, 2023).
Syd Zolf’s interdisciplinary practice queerly enacts how ethics founders on the shoals of the political, imagining other possibilities of sociality, space, and time. They have published five books of poetry, including Janey’s Arcadia, Neighbour Procedure, and Human Resources; and a selected poetry, Social Poesis. Honors include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, several major grants, and finalist for several other prizes, including two Lambda Literary Awards. Zolf’s art films have screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam and White Cube Bermondsey. Their theoretical text, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Zolf teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wednesday, 10/16
Thursday, 10/17
Friday, 10/18
Saturday, 10/19
Sunday, 10/20
Monday, 10/21
Tuesday, 10/22
Debut Authors in Horror, Romance, Historical Fiction, & More
12:00 PM in person
sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
hosted by: Kitsi Watterson
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Navigating the publishing world as a debut author can be by turns exciting, confusing, joyful, and scary. Three Philadelphia-area 2024 debut authors will discuss their journeys to publication, their experiences as debuts, and the finer points of craft across the genre kaleidoscope of fiction and nonfiction. Moderated by Penn faculty and award-winning writer and journalist Kathryn "Kitsi" Watterson.
Ashton Lattimore is an author, award-winning journalist and former lawyer. Her debut historical fiction novel, All We Were Promised (Ballantine Books), was released in April 2024. By day, she is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a nonprofit news outlet whose work centers on communities of color. Her nonfiction writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and Essence. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Columbia Journalism School, and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. A New Jersey native, Ashton now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and two sons.
Laura Piper Lee writes adult romantic comedies. Her debut novel, Hannah Tate, Beyond Repair released in February 2024 in the U.S. and in the U.K. from Union Square & Co. It was named One of the Best New Rom-Com Books of 2024 by Brit & Co and One of the Best (and Most Anticipated) Romance Books of 2024 by Elle magazine. She is currently working on her second novel, Zoe Brennan, First Crush, which is set to release in February 2025, also from Union Square & Co. Laura also writes fantasy and science fiction novels for children, and when she is not writing, works as an education policy attorney for school districts, colleges, and universities.
NICOLE M. WOLVERTON is the author of the young adult horror novel A Misfortune of Lake Monsters (CamCat Books, released July 2024). Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in the Saturday Evening Post, Aji magazine, and the Nighty Night podcast with Rabia Chaudry, among others, and she served as editor of the 2021 anthology Bodies Full of Burning (Sliced Up Press). She is the assistant editor of Penn Nursing Magazine and a 2023 graduate of Penn's Masters of Liberal Arts program, with a degree in horror and storytelling.