November 2021
Monday, 11/1
Tuesday, 11/2
Wednesday, 11/3
SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT
Hosted by Equilibria
7:30 PM (ET) in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Join us at Writers House for an open mic night led by Equilibria, a publication that explores the relationship between writing and art. Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. Share a poem, a story, a song you’ve been working on, or whatever your heart desires! We hope to see you there
Thursday, 11/4
Friday, 11/5
Saturday, 11/6
Zachary Sergi and Jennifer Yu: Writing for Young Adults
Homecoming Weekend Alumni Authors Series
4:00 PM in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
Sponsored by: the Lucy F. DeMarco Fund for Youth Literature
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
In honor of Homecoming Weekend at Penn, alumni writers Zachary Sergi (C'10), author of Major Detours (Running Press Kids, 2021), and Jennifer Yu, (C'16), author of Four Weeks, Five People (Harlequin Teen 2017) and Imagine Us Happy (Harlequin Teen 2018), will join us at the Kelly Writers House — in the Class of 1942 Garden, under a covered tent — for a reading of their work, followed by a conversation about YA fiction. What special approaches do writers take when they write for young adults? How do authors craft narratives that appeal to teens? And what are the challenges — and rewards — of YA writing?
Queer writer Zachary Sergi grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and studied Creative Writing at Regis High School and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a television and fiction writer currently living in Los Angeles, where he writes his Interactive Novels and lives with his husband. Zachary is currently writing new Interactive Series, promoting his YA debut, MAJOR DETOURS , and working on his second novel for Running Press Teens.
Jennifer Yu is the author of the young adult novels FOUR WEEKS, FIVE PEOPLE (2017) and IMAGINE US HAPPY (2018). When not writing, you can find her weeping intermittently about the Boston Celtics, photos of the Earth from outer space, and the etymology of the word disaster. She has lived in Kansas, Boston, and Los Angeles, though these days she is mostly living out of her 2018 Toyota Corolla LE as she hikes her way across the Mountain West.
Sunday, 11/7
Monday, 11/8
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:00 PM in the Writers House Garden
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, 11/9
John Keats: Scientist & Poet
A Collaborative Celebration
7:00 PM in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
co-sponsored by Penn Medicine and the English Department
hosted by: Penn English Professor Toni Bowers and Penn Physician Jason Karlawish
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Scientists, poets, students, and lovers of language are invited to join Penn English Professor Toni Bowers, Ph.D. and Penn Physician Jason Karlawish, M.D. in an evening of conversation in honor of John Keats. John Keats (1795-1821) practiced medicine and wrote poetry. Though he lived to be only 26, Keats continues to this day to influence doctors and poets alike. Everyone is invited to learn more about Keats’s creativity across boundaries. Join us to hear Keats’s poetry read aloud and share your own favorite selections from Keats’s poetry!
Wednesday, 11/10
A Poetry Reading by Erica Kaufman
6:00 PM in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Erica Kaufman is the author of POST CLASSIC (Roof Books, 2019), INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books, 2013), and censory impulse(Factory School, 2009); and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Venn Diagram, 2009) and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974 (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2014). Among other places, Erica's prose and scholarly writing has been included in New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels (ed. M. Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein (eds. L. Esdale and D. Mix, MLA, 2018), The Supposium: Though Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times (ed. J. Retallack, Litmus Press, 2018), and Reading Experimental Writing (ed. G. Colby, Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Recent poems can be found in A Perfect Vacuum and P=Queue. Kaufman is the director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking and Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. She lives in the woods.
Thursday, 11/11
A Conversation with Clayton Neuman
A RealArts@Penn event, sponsored by Creative Ventures
5:00 PM on YouTube
Hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
Watch: here
In his twelve years with AMC, Clayton Neuman has been influential in developing their social and digital content programs and building the company's award-winning gaming business from the ground up. Throughout his tenure and in the broader gaming and digital content industries he is recognized as a creative, strategic, and revenue-driven leader that has created one of the top IP portfolios in entertainment. This event will be online only.
Friday, 11/12
Saturday, 11/13
Sunday, 11/14
Monday, 11/15
BRODSKY GALLERY PRESENTS: BIRD HOUSES
Brodsky Gallery
6:00 PM (ET) in the Class of 1942 Garden
Over fifty Writers House community members responded to a call to make or modify a bird house for our second gallery show of the fall. Come admire their handiwork — with paint, yarn, collage, and other materials — ahead of the garden installation
Tuesday, 11/16
Dance and the Poetics of Diaspora
6:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
hosted by: Dahlia Li
This event is online only
watch: here
How can words render the roving worlds of dance and the ever-fluctuating communities of diasporas? To be diasporic means to be scattered from one's presumed homeland while to be in dance entails attunement to the moving rhythms of the world. This series brings together emerging diasporic artists for whom dance offers a way of articulating an embodied poetics of being in a disorienting world. Taking the linguistic elusiveness of performance and embodied experience as an occasion for finding new words, we'll see what language forms when diasporic bodies hail each other in the present.
Dahlia Li is a trans Chinese diasporic artist and writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily out of dance, poetics, and moving image practices that explore histories of diaspora and alternative cosmologies of the erotic. She is finishing a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania where her dissertation, Caress without Body, is a series of performance ethnographies on dance as embodied diasporic technology. Additionally, she is writing a book-length collection of personal essays that explores psychoanalysis, time, gendered embodiment, and the fleshly afterlives of 20th century Asian wars and revolutions. She collaborates extensively with dance artists Be Heintzman Hope, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Yin Mei.
John Maria Gutierrez is a multidisciplinary actor, dancer, creator, and educator who
performs on screen and stage, nationally and internationally. Originally from the small island of Manhattan, John was
raised in a hood commonly known as “Little Dominican Republic,” or Washington Heights, and has spent most of their life on
Lenape land.
John combines acting, b-boy, and postmodern aesthetics with original music, singing, and experimental
theater to unwind a complex urban disparity brought on by social and systemic failings. His work reaches for healing and dialogue within
a world actively facing, reflecting, and surviving global colonization and systemic oppressions. As the first person in
their family born in the US, John is carving out and balancing their own identity within their family, cultural history,
and artistic expression.
Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn, New York. She creates performances that investigate how black folks’ cultural, familial, and personal histories are embedded in their bodies and influence their everyday and performative movement. She aims to incite critical engagement with embodied black history as a means to imagine black futurity. Her work has been presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, Lewis Center for the Arts, La Mama Courthouse, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. She currently serves as Head of Movement for Drama at Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan and is adjunct faculty in the Dance MFA at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
Wednesday, 11/17
A conversation with journalist Bob Schieffer
Povich Journalism Program
6:00 PM in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
Hosted by: Al Filreis
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Bob Schieffer has been a reporter all his adult life. He got his first job in journalism in 1957 at age 20, the summer of his sophomore year at Texas Christian University. The job was in the news department of KXOL, a small radio station in Fort Worth. He was paid one dollar an hour and worked there 44 hours a week until he graduated.
Since that first job he has received a weekly pay check for a variety of jobs in journalism, including the three years he spent in the Air Force where he edited a series of military newspapers and other publications. He returned to Fort Worth in 1962 and joined the Fort Worth Star Telegram which sent him to cover the Vietnam War in 1965. That led to local television which led to CBS News in Washington. From the time he won his first writing award at J.P. Elder Junior High School Schieffer wanted to be a reporter, but most of his professional recognition came after he turned 65, when most people retire.
Someone once said if he were a race horse, the handicappers would describe him as having “late foot.” When Schieffer turned 65, he was just hitting his stride. He served for nearly two years as anchor of the CBS Evening News, a period that saw the largest ratings increase in over a decade, wrote four books including his most recent OVERLOAD: Finding Truth in the Deluge of News, and the 2003 New York Times best seller, This Just In. During that time, he was designated a “living legend” by the Library of Congress, was inducted into the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences Hall of Face, won two Emmys (one for life time achievement), took Face the Nation to number one in the ratings and moderated three presidential debates. Schieffer officially stepped down as moderator of Face the Nation in May of 2015 after heading the broadcast for a record 24 years but has continued offering commentary and analysis. He has been associated with CBS News for 52 years.
Schieffer has won virtually every award in broadcast journalism including eight Emmys. He says his most meaningful recognition came when TCU designated its communication college the “Bob Schieffer College of Communication.” Schieffer has also been awarded 15 honorary degrees, is a proud graduate of Texas Christian University and was awarded a fellowship to Harvard's Kennedy School in 2015. He and his wife Pat celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary, April 15. They have two daughters and three granddaughters. He marked his 84th birthday February 25, looks forward to the next one and says he's finally going to dial back. But he always says that.
Thursday, 11/18
Michelle Zauner: a conversation
Blutt Singer-Songwriter Symposium
6:00 PM in person
Hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze-inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). Her most recent album Jubilee was released in June 2021. Also in 2021, she composed and produced the original video game soundtrack for Sable, out now via Sony Music Soundtracks. Her first book is Crying in H Mart, now a New York Times Bestseller and slated for a feature film adaptation for Orion Pictures, featuring an original screenplay and soundtrack from Zauner.