November 2025
Saturday, 11/1/2025
Sunday, 11/2/2025
Monday, 11/3/2025
A Conversation with Ken Kalfus
Friedman Fiction Program
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Ken Kalfus is the author of three collections of short stories and five novels, including his latest, A Hole in the Story. His previous novels include A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, a finalist for the National Book Award. He’s also the author of 2 A.M. in Little America, which was published in 2022. His collection, Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, was a finalist of the PEN/Faulkner Award. Its title story was adapted for an HBO movie. Kalfus has received a Pew Fellowships in the Arts award and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He's written for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, newyorker.com, and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than ten foreign languages.
Tuesday, 11/4/2025
YA Writer Randy Ribay: Reading and Conversation
DeMarco Program
6:00 PM in person
co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program
hosted by: candice iloh
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Randy Ribay writes stories for young people and the young at heart. He's the author of Patron Saints of Nothing; Everything We Never Had; Avatar, the Last Airbender: The Reckoning of Roku; and more. He's a two-time National Book Award nominee, a co-winner of the Michael L. Printz award, and a recipient of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association book award. His books have appeared on the New York Times, Indie, and USA Today best-sellers lists.
Born in the Philippines and raised in Michigan and Colorado, Randy earned his BA in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his Ed.M. in Language and Literacy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, son, and cat-like dog.
Wednesday, 11/5/2025
On Franz Kafka's Selected Stories
Mark Harman in conversation with Jean-Michel Rabaté and Liliane Weissberg
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a conversation with Mark Harman, an award-winning translator and scholar, whose translation of Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024) presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. In Selected Stories, Harman offers a sensitive English rendering of Kafka’s unique German prose — terse, witty, and laden with ambiguities and double meanings. Professors Jean-Michel Rabate and Lillian Weissberg will co-lead the conversation.
Born and raised in Dublin, Mark Harman received his Ph.D. from Yale, where he wrote a dissertation on Kafka and Kleist. His award-winning Kafka translations include The Castle, (MLA/Lois Roth award), Amerika: The Missing Person, and his latest Selected Stories (Harvard University Press. 2024). J.M. Coetzee praised Harman’s Castle translation for being “semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka’s nuances” and predicted that it would be “the translation of preference for some time to come.” Author of numerous book chapters and essays on Kafka, Harman has been an invited speaker on Kafka’s works at arts festivals, libraries, and universities, including, most recently, Harvard and Oxford (the latter houses many of Kafka’s manuscripts). Among Harman’s other translations are works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, as well as by a number of contemporary German-language writers. A former Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, his other residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Tyrone Guthrie Center (Ireland).
ModPo Webcast, Week 10
8:30 PM in person and on YouTube
Everyone is welcome to join the people of ModPo for this live, interactive webcast — in person or online. ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.” Find more information about ModPo webcasts here.
Thursday, 11/6/2025
Fact-Checking in Crisis: A Lunchtime Conversation
Featuring Kory Stamper, Stefan Fatsis, and Austin Kelley
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Julia Bloch
co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program and Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a conversation among three authors working across the fields of lexicography, fact-checking, journalism, and fiction writing. We'll talk about the history of fact-checking, its seemingly precipitous collapse in an age of misinformation, media defunding, and digital upheaval, and the status of truth in our current landscape. Kory Stamper, Stefan Fatsis, and Austin Kelley will be joined by Julia Bloch and students of the Creative Writing Program's Truth and Disinformation Lab.
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and author who has spent too many years thinking about what words mean. Her lexicography career includes work at Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionaries, and Dictionary.com, as well as community-based lexicography for the Miami Nation of Indiana. She has worked as a fact-checker and was on the advisory council for the 2022 Truth in Journalism Fact-Checking Guide. She is the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (2017) and True Color: The Strange and Spectacular History of Defining Color from Azure to Zinc Pink (forthcoming March 2026).
Stefan Fatsis (C'85) is the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak, about the world of competitive Scrabble; A Few Seconds of Panic, about life in the National Football League; and Wild and Outside, about minor league baseball. His latest book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, was published in October by Grove Atlantic. In four decades as a journalist, Fatsis has written and talked for Slate, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and many other outlets. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Austin Kelley is a former New Yorker fact checker. As a journalist he has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. He has a Ph.D. from Duke University, and now teaches writing at NYU. The Fact Checker (April 2025) is his first novel.
Don't Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac's Rumours
A presentation by Alan Light
5:30 PM in person
hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
co-sponsored by: The Povich Journalism Program Fund and RealArts@Penn
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Emmy Award-winning music journalist Alan Light is the author of numerous books including The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah” (which was adapted into an acclaimed documentary), as well as Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain and biographies of Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, and the Beastie Boys. He was the cowriter of bestselling memoirs by Gregg Allman and Peter Frampton. Alan was a senior writer at Rolling Stone and the editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin magazines. He contributes frequently to The New York Times, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal, among many publications, and cohosts the podcast Sound Up!
Friday, 11/7/2025
Saturday, 11/8/2025
Homecoming Open House
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Renew your acquaintance with the Kelly Writers House or get to know this lively and innovative home for writers of all ages and genres. Visit our Open House to join members of the KWH community for informal conversation, coffee, and light refreshments. Advanced registration is not required, but we'd love to hear from you!
Naomi Xu Elegant, Lauren Francis-Sharma, and Beth Kephart
A celebration of new books by alumni fiction writers
Cheryl J. Family Fiction Program
4:00 PM in person
hosted by: Karen Rile
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Naomi Xu Elegant is an author and freelance journalist living in New York. Her debut novel, Gingko Season, was published by W.W. Norton in 2025 and named a New York Times Editors' Choice. She is co-editor of Gully, an independent literary magazine, and writes a monthly newsletter called luanqibazao. Her writing has appeared in Monocle, Fortune, Atlas Obscura, The Drift and elsewhere.
Lauren Francis-Sharma is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Casualties of Truth, which was inspired by her attendance at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Amnesty Hearings in 1996. She is also the author of Book of the Little Axe, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction, and 'Til the Well Runs Dry, winner of the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the ALA. Lauren is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She serves as Chair of the Awards Committee for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, a widely published essayist, a paper artist, a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and both a Penn alum and a winner of the Beltran Family Prize for teaching. Her most recent books include Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, Good Books for Bad Children: The Genius of Ursula Nordstrom, and her first novel for adults, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, which received a starred Booklist review among other kind press. Beth’s paper arts have been featured in galleries, museum gift shops, and craft festivals. Her art also appears alongside her prose about writing and life in her Substack, The Hush and the Howl. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com
Sunday, 11/9/2025
Monday, 11/10/2025
ModPo Webcast, Final Words
11:00 AM in person and on YouTube
Everyone is welcome to join the people of ModPo for this live, interactive webcast — in person or online. ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.” Find more information about ModPo webcasts here.
A Meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee
5:30 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, 11/11/2025
A Conversation with Gabrielle Hamilton
About her new memoir, Next of Kin
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
KWH Faculty Director Al Filreis will host a conversation with chef Gabrielle Hamilton about her rigorous and unflinching memoir, Next of Kin (Random House, October 2025), an electrifying story about the demise of a singular family.
Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York's East Village and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Her newest memoir, Next of Kin, will be published by Random House in October 2025. Hamilton received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, SaveurHouse Beautiful, and Food & Wine. Her work has been anthologized in eight volumes of Best Food Writing, and she most recently was a monthly Eat columnist at the New York Times Magazine. She has appeared on television on numerous shows, winning an Emmy for her season of Mind of a Chef (Netflix). She has won four James Beard Foundation Awards, including for Best Chef NYC, and Outstanding Chef in the country. Hamilton teaches in Penn's Creative Writing Program.
Wednesday, 11/12/2025
Masaki Takahashi: Performance and Discussion
Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Lex Bartee
co-sponsored by: The Excelano Project
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Masaki Takahashi is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Lansing, Michigan (2022–2024) and a passionate advocate for the power of poetry to connect and inspire. As the founder and host of the Poetry Room open mic and nonprofit, Masaki has created a dynamic space where poets of all backgrounds can share their work and grow in their craft. Masaki has been featured on prominent platforms such as Button Poetry, TEDx MSU, and Write About Now. His work has appeared in literary journals like Lunch Ticket and Rigorous, and they have collaborated with esteemed organizations including the National Park Service, Interlochen Center for the Arts, the Michigan Council of Teachers of English, and numerous local universities, public schools, and nonprofit organizations. Above all, Masaki is deeply committed to education and finds great fulfillment in mentoring students, supporting their growth both as writers and individuals. A storyteller at heart, Masaki believes in poetry’s transformative power to heal, challenge, and build community.
Thursday, 11/13/2025
City Living, City Writing from Weimar Berlin to Philadelphia Today
Daniel Brook and Matt Katz in conversation
12:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
co-sponsored by: the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, the Department of Political Science, and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
This conversation between journalist/biographer Daniel Brook and journalist/podcaster Matt Katz will explore writing about cities, moving from Weimar Berlin -- the setting of Brook's recent biography of queer German-Jewish psychiatrist, social theorist, and activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld -- to Philadelphia today. How do writers take huge swaths of information about their subjects and their associated places and whittle that down to produce compelling journalistic narratives? Brook, who has been writing long-form journalism for 25 years (including for the former Philadelphia City Paper), has answers. Katz is the executive producer of City Cast Philly, a local news-and-culture podcast, and has taught journalistic writing in the Creative Writing Program at Penn.
Daniel Brook (he/him) is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in publications including Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine. His research has been supported by institutions including the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Biographers International Organization which awarded him a Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship. His book, A History of Future Cities, was longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and selected as one of the ten favorite books of the year by the Washington Post. His latest, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin, garnered a starred review in Publisher's Weekly and was praised as "elegant [and] timely" by The New Yorker. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and educated at Yale, Brook lives in New Orleans."
MATT KATZ is an investigative reporter, journalist, and podcast host who has covered everything from local school boards to presidential elections to natural disasters. In 2024 he created, wrote, and hosted an autobiographical podcast, Inconceivable Truth, about how he came to exist. Vogue named it one of the best podcasts of the year, and it hit the Top 10 on the Apple Podcasts charts. For many years Matt covered former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, first for The Philadelphia Inquirer and then WNYC and NPR, winning a Peabody Award and publishing a book, "American Governor: Chris Christie's Bridge to Redemption," with Simon & Schuster. Matt's reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, PBS, and The Washington Post. He also works as an adjunct professor teaching journalism in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Matt is currently executive producer of City Cast Philly, a daily news-and-culture podcast and email newsletter about Philadelphia.
Patrick Rosal: A Reading and Conversation
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Julia Bloch
sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program and Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Photo credit: Mark Rosal
Patrick Rosal is the author of The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, listed among The Boston Globe’s best books of the year and named winner of the William Carlos Williams Book Award. His 2016 collection Brooklyn Antediluvian won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a self-taught visual artist and musician and has composed art song for traditional and non-traditional instrumentation. He has made hundreds of appearances in Europe, Africa, Asia, and throughout the Americas at venues that include Lincoln Center, NJPAC, and historic Filipino Community Hall in Delano. He penned the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Jessica Hagedorn’s seminal novel Dogeaters and has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program, NJSCA, and the Civitella Ranieri Residency. He is the inaugural Campus Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden and has served as Interim Director of the MFA Program, where he is a Distinguished Professor. He is currently writing a book of prayers in addition to a meditation on the contemporary sacred.
Friday, 11/14/2025
Saturday, 11/15/2025
Sunday, 11/16/2025
Monday, 11/17/2025
New faculty books showcase: a reading and celebration
Featuring Weike Wang, Ahmad Almallah, and Brooke O’Harra
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Julia Bloch
sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program
RSVP: register here to attend in person
Join the Creative Writing Program for an event celebrating new books in fiction, poetry, and theatre by faculty members Weike Wang, Ahmad Almallah, and Brooke O'Harra. We'll celebrate the release of their books — Wang's Rental House, Almallah's Wrong Winds, and O'Harra's Who Is In the Room? Queer Strategies for Redefining the Role of the Theater Director — by hearing from the writers and then joining them for a Q&A and discussion about process and practice. Open to all; reception to follow.
Tuesday, 11/18/2025
Novelist Howard Langer
In conversation with Al Filreis
12:00 PM in person
sponsored by: the Wexler Fund for Programs in Jewish Life and Culture
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Howard Langer was born in Manhattan in 1950. He attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under the poet, Yehuda Amichai, and the novelist, Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto. While Langer won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate, he ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable. His most notable case was a class action that recovered $200 million from a bank that had abetted fraudulent telemarketers who preyed on the poor and elderly, recovering all the funds that had been stolen. Langer began writing The Last Dekreptizer, his first novel, in 2021 after attending a zoom workshop by George Saunders sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia at the height of the Covid pandemic. Inspired by Saunders' presentation, he began writing the next morning what eventually morphed into the novel. The novel has won a National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the Athenaeum Award. Howard and his wife live in Philadelphia. He has two adult sons.
SideGig Launch Party
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a celebration of SideGig, a video podcast hosted by Kevin M. F. Platt and Paul Saint-Amour. Recorded and edited at the Writers House by Zach Carduner, Magda Andrews-Hoke, and Makena Deveraux, SideGig features music-making sessions and lively discussions about poetry, music, and art with a series of fascinating guests, including Emily Wilson (episode #1), Eugene Ostashevksy (episode #2), and Charles Bernstein (episode #3). At this official launch party, we’ll screen clips from the show and chat with various participants about the making and editing of the series.
Wednesday, 11/19/2025
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
Poetry, prose, and 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, 11/20/2025
REALARTS@PENN INTERNSHIPS: INFO SESSION
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Have you been dreaming of the perfect summer internship? One that might help set you on your career path? RealArts@Penn can help make that dream a reality! RealArts@Penn offers paid summer internships in publishing, TV and film, journalism, public relations, talent management, music, theater, and museums. Internship partner/host organizations have included BOMB Magazine, The Guggenheim, United Talent Agency, Spiegel & Grau, Library of Congress, FADER Magazine, Morgan Museum and Library, and Artists First. The RealArts project draws upon a vast network of Penn alumni who help enable hands-on and face-to-face interactions between students and the people who make arts and culture their business. Join us for an informal conversation with past RealArts@Penn interns to learn more about the project and the application process. Lunch will be served.
Jack Spicer at 100
A Conversation with Daniel Benjamin (co-editor of Spicer's Collected Letters)
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Timmy Straw and Julieta Vittore Dutto
co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Daniel Benjamin received his PhD in English and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. With Kevin Killian and Kelly Holt, he edited Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). He is the author of an afterword to Jack Spicer's The Wasps (speCt! Books, 2016). With Eric Sneathen, he co-edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017), and with Claire Marie Stancek, he co-edited Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (Tuumba Press/Giramondo, 2016). His academic articles have appeared in Jacket2, small axe, Contemporary Literature, and European Romantic Review. He teaches English at Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.
About Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared
The more than 300 letters collected in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared are a crucial component of Jack Spicer's unique oeuvre, and they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterizes his poetry. Spicer writes tenderly to lovers and friends in self-reflective series that recall the poetic sequences in My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Letters to elders like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound and to poetic collaborators like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan provide insight into the inner workings of an avant-garde, and are indispensable documents for students of 20th century American poetry. Writing to younger poets, Spicer offers inspiring words of mentorship — sometimes with a sting — about how to live in total devotion to art. Spicer's letters paint a unique portrait of the political and personal challenges faced by a gay man at mid-century, including documents from his involvement in the early gay rights movement.