Marathon Reading: Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (4/15/21)

Plants And Poetics: A Panel Discussion (//)

City Planning Poetics 10: Urban Futures (3/15/21)

Recycling Your Words: A Zine Workshop (2/18/21)

Eric Bazilian: "My Life As A Song" (11/5/20)

Mess+Process: Jessica Vaughn (10/29/20)

City Planning Poetics 9: Feeling The City (10/20/20)

An Introduction To Zines (10/1/20)

Poems From A Sinking City: A Conversation With Indonesian Poet Ahmad Khairudin (Adin) (9/24/20)

Waist Beads Workshop: Self-Love Through The Diaspora (2/4/20)

Daedalus Quartet: Migration Through Music (11/15/19)

City Planning Poetics 8: Urban Ruins (10/7/19)

City Planning Poetics 7: Carceral Justice (3/21/19)

Writing About TV: Magic (11/12/18)

Desegregation Remix: 3 Women Sing The Borders (11/8/18)

City Planning Poetics 6: Urban Revitalization (10/23/18)

Edible Books Contest (10/15/18)

A Conversation With Travel Writer Rolf Potts (4/3/18)

City Planning Poetics 5: The Queer Ordinary (2/22/18)

City Planning Poetics 4: Urban Memory (11/13/17)

Artist Erica Baum In Conversation With Al Filreis (11/8/17)

The Life And Music Of Lou Reed (10/19/17)

Edible Books Contest (9/26/17)

City Planning Poetics 3: Queer Placemaking (4/20/17)

Marathon Reading: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (3/30/17)

Valentines Day Chili Cook-Off + Chopped (2/14/17)

Penn Plays Fellowship Reading (1/20/17)

Writing About TV: Home (10/26/16)

Edible Books Party (9/16/16)

A Conversation With Sharon Hayes And Brooke O'Harra (9/7/16)

City Planning Poetics 2 (9/6/16)

Marathon Reading: If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (3/31/16)

Writing About TV: Real (3/16/16)

Sonic Poetry (2/18/16)

Sensible Nonsense (2/17/16)

Boundaries, Therapy, And The Writing Cure: The Case Of Anne Sexton (2/11/16)

Entrepreneurial Journalism Pitch Night (12/8/15)

Mapping With Light (9/3/15)

Marathon Reading: 100 Years of Solitude (4/23/15)

Symbiosis Gallery Opening (4/15/15)

Daedalus Quartet Performance (3/25/15)

Leonard Cohen Song Symposium (3/19/15)

7-Up on Rush (2/12/15)

Sensible Nonsense (2/5/15)

Jake Marmer's Hermeneutic Stomp (1/20/15)

Entrepreneurial Journalism Pitch Night (12/9/14)

Writing About Art (11/18/14)

Writing About TV: Girls (11/13/14)

Postcolonial Digital Humanities (10/27/14)

The Foreign Fork (10/20/14)

Edible Books Party (10/16/14)

Prometheus Unbound (4/9/14)

Symbiosis (4/9/14)

Jesse Malin (4/3/14)

Sensible Nonsense: Memoir/Kids Lit (2/25/14)

Robert Greenhut (3/4/14)

Writing About TV: The Family (2/25/14)

Marathon: Jazz (2/20/14)

Entrepreneurial Journalism (12/10/13)

Writing About Art: Glenn Ligon (12/5/13)

Kanye West Fest (11/11/13)

Cost of Coal (11/16/13)

Writing About TV (11/6/13)

Lit and Psych Together (10/29/13)

Joni Fest (10/24/13)

Blonde on Blonde (10/22/13)

Reinventing the Classroom (10/16/13)

Inga Saffron (10/16/13)

Jaap Blonk (10/14/13)

Edible Books (10/7/13)

Meredith Stiehm (10/1/13)

Michael Rauch (9/23/13)

Twit Crit Blog (4/11/13)

Timebank (3/14/13)

Round Up Holler Girl (2/20/13)

Sensible Nonsense (2/6/13)

Ken Lum (1/30/13)

Edible Books (1/29/13)

Penn Appétit 5th Anniversary (12/6/12)

Changing the Way We Drink (11/7/12)

Andrew Whiteman and Ariel Engle (10/24/12)

Writing About Art: Marcel Duchamp (10/9/12)

Charlie Morrow (10/8/12)

Dan Fishback and Ezra Berkley Nepon (9/11/12)

Material Construction (12/7/11)

Rolf Potts (11/15/11)

Kristina Ford (11/10/11)

Creative Economy (11/5/11)

Judy's Turn (11/2/11)

Flash Fiction Flash Mob (10/27/11)

Re:Activism in Philadelphia (10/15/11)

Edible Books (10/5/11)

March 4, 2025: Beethoven in Beijing

Join us for a roundtable on the documentary Beethoven in Beijing to uncover the story behind Philadelphia Orchestra’s pivotal performance in China in 1973 that shaped US-China cultural diplomacy. Penn graduate student Xinyi Ye will host a gathering of journalists, librarians, and researchers —Jennifer Lin, Liza Vick, and Shelley Zhang— who will each introduce their research and works on our very local and beloved Philadelphia Orchestra’s China visit. While the archives uncover the Orchestra’s behind the scene stories, we’ll invite you to discuss the art and science of archival-based non-fiction writing!

Jennifer Lin is an award-winning journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. She produced and co-directed the feature-length documentary, Beethoven in Beijing, about the Philadelphia Orchestra’s China legacy, which premiered in 2021 on PBS’s Great Performances. The film was a 2020 finalist for the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns prize for film and received support from the National Endowment for Humanities. In 2022, Temple University Press published her companion oral history, Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China. For 31 years, Jennifer worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter, including posts as a foreign correspondent in China, a financial correspondent on Wall Street, and a national correspondent in Washington, DC. In 2017, Jennifer published a family memoir, Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family (Rowman & Littlefield). As a filmmaker, Jennifer directed and produced a short documentary, Ten Times Better, about an 89-year-old Chinese-American blackjack dealer in Las Vegas who was a pioneer in ballet and Broadway. Focusing on the Asian experience in dance, Jennifer is working on another documentary project, Beyond Yellowface, about two New York City dancers trying to rid ballet of offensive Asian stereotypes.

As the Head of then Otto E. Albrecht Music Library, Lisa Vick oversees the operations of the music library, including the Ormandy Music and Media Center. She is responsible for the collection development of music materials and serves as the liaison to the Department of Music. Liza is very active in the profession of music librarianship; she has served as member-at-large of the board of directors of the Music Library Association, and as chair of the MLA Publications and Nominating Committees. She was elected to the Council of the American Musicological Society and is a Past President of the Music Library Association. She holds graduate degrees in library science and ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Shelly Zhang (GR'22) is a creative writer, musician, and researcher. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the President of the Association for Chinese Music Research. In 2022, she curated the multi-disciplinary event, “Li Delun in Philadelphia: Ethnography, Archives, and Music across the Pacific,” which included a symposium, recital, and p op-up exhibit at Penn’s Kislak Center. In 2023, her poem, “The Price of Ambition,” was commissioned for a music composition, which premiered in 2024. Her academic articles can be found in the internationally peer-reviewed journals, Ethnomusicology Forum and Journal of Material Culture. She is currently working on her first monograph, Millennial Migration: Chinese Musicians after the Cultural Revolution, and developing a second project on Asiatic femininity and issues of performance.

Xini Ye is a graduate student of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at University of Pennsylvania focusing on Chinese art history. Her current research interests include Chinese opera and the collection of East Asian material culture in American museums. She graduated from The University of Hong Kong (First Class Honours) with double majors in Art History and Music and a minor in French. She excavated Vedi Fortress (Armenia) in the Ararat Plain Southeast Archaeological Project in 2022 and 2023. She is interested in exploring visual and performing arts as cultural heritage and living practices in global contexts. She has completed the HKU Undergraduate Student Research Fellowship on Chinese Yue opera and has performed as a member of Penn Jazz Ensemble, Penn Afro-Brazilian Ensemble, HKU Chamber Singers (Hong Kong), St Andrews Chorus (Scotland), and St Leonard's Chapel Choir (Scotland). She is currently the chair of the Penn East Asian Studies Graduate Student Research Colloquium (GSRC) and the EALC department’s representative at Penn’s Graduate Student Government of the School of Arts & Sciences (Sasgov). She also serves as the Graduate Guide at the Penn Museum and the Gallery Ambassador at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Janurary 20, 2025: KWH Prize Winners Presentations

Join us for presentations by some of the students and alumni who have won prizes (from the Kelly Writers House and Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing) for projects in a variety of genres and modes, including fiction, playwriting, memoir, poetry, journalism, and community writing workshop development. Featured presenters include Leo Biehl (Wexler Family Prize), Armie Chardiet (Heled Travel and Research Prize), Mmachi Ezigbo (Kerry Prize), Meg Gladieux (Junior Fellows Prize), Irma Flóra Kiss (Universe in Verse Prize), Taja Mazaj (Creative Ventures Prize), and Wahid Sarwar (Goldstein Prize). A reception will follow, as well as the opportunity to hear about the application process for KWH prizes.

Taja Mazaj (C'24) graduated from Penn with a major in Political Science and a minor in English. As an artist, she has long been interested in the intersections of art and politics and has explored this through pieces of literary journalism and creative nonfiction. For her Creative Ventures project, Mazaj is investigating craftwork communities (with a particular focus on embroidery) from across the world, from Palestine to Romania to the Americas.

November 14, 2024: A talk by Robert Sharenow

Robert Sharenow is a leading creative media executive, as well as an award-winning writer and producer. Sharenow currently serves as President of Programming for A+E Networks, overseeing all creative development and production for their brands, including A&E, HISTORY, Lifetime, A&E Indie Films, and Home.Made.Nation. Under his creative leadership, his teams have won many Prime Time and News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards, and received an Academy Award and several Oscar nominations. His teams have developed industry leading series in nearly every genre, including Emmy-winners, Intervention and Born This Way; unscripted hits such as Storage Wars and Dance Moms; top-rated TV movies, Flowers in the Attic (Heather Graham, Ellen Burstyn) and Bonnie & Clyde (Emile Hirsh, William Hurt); documentary events such as the Peabody-Award-winning Surviving R. Kelly; drama series, YOU (EP Greg Berlanti) and Peabody Award-winning, UnReal (EP Marti Noxin); and the upcoming WWII with Tom Hanks and Kevin Costner’s The West. As a writer/producer, his TV credits include the History Channel series, This Week in History, Michael Moore’s Emmy-award-winning, TV Nation, and the PBS children’s series, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego. He is the author of three novels, including The Berlin Boxing Club, which was awarded the Sydney Taylor Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries and has been published internationally in several languages. As a musician he was a co-writer on They Might Be Giants Grammy-winning children’s record, Here Come the 1,2,3s, and he co-created and released two albums with William Shatner, Bill (with the Jonas Brothers label for Universal Music), and So Fragile, So Blue (a collaboration with Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra). Sharenow received his B.A. from Brandeis University and an M.A from New York University, where he held a fellowship in the American Studies Department. His greatest unfulfilled creative dream was to launch his own newspaper comic strip.

September 17, 2024: Small Ball (the musical)

Join us for a discussion of the musical Small Ball. With book and lyrics by Mickle Maher, and music by the avant-rock duo Anthony Barilla and Merel van Dijk, Small Ball was birthed from the question: "What about a basketball musical?" Taking place in a world six months from today where every myth, every fairytale, and every work of fantasy fiction has been discovered to be real, Small Ball is the story of Michael Jordan (not the Michael Jordan), a down-on-his-luck journeyman basketball player who finds himself playing point guard for a newly formed basketball team of six inch tall players on the isle of Lilliput from Gulliver’s Travels. Is there mystery yet in this world of Great Disenchantment? The wildly comic and strange trip of love, loss, colonialist politics around very tiny people, and poor sportsmanship that is Small Ball, says Yes.

April 18, 2024: ANNUAL KWH MARATHON READING: GIOVANNI'S ROOM

oin us for a live marathon reading of Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel about love — and the fear of love — set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris. We’ll have food from the book, a special commemorative t-shirt for sale (free for all readers!), and extra copies of the novel so you can read along.

April 11, 2024: SINGER-SONGWRITER ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO

Alejandro Escovedo, a celebrated singer and songwriter, has as eclectic a background and body of work as any rock artist of his generation. As comfortable performing with a string ensemble as he is with an amped-up power trio, and as likely to bare his soul in his lyrics as he is to display some serious rock & roll swagger, Escovedo had already played an important role in punk (with the Nuns), roots rock (the True Believers), and alt-country (Rank & File) before he launched a solo career that's seen him work with everyone from Tony Visconti, John Cale to Bruce Springsteen. Beginning with 1992's Gravity, Escovedo's music has been consistently literate, ambitious, and eclectic, with 2001's A Man Under the Influence exploring different genres and approaches from track to track, while 2008's Real Animal and 2016's Burn Something Beautiful focused on passionate, guitar-based rock & roll. 2018's The Crossing (and its 2021 Spanish-language counterpart La Cruzada) told a richly detailed story of the immigrant experience. His latest, Echo Dancing, is a career-spanning collection that completely reinvents and re-records his previous work and traces a one-of-a-kind musical life from ‘70s New York punk to Austin's "musical conscience and hometown hero" (NPR Alt Latino) to unflinching advocate for musicians’ mental health and immigrant causes.

March 20, 2024: LOVE & ROCKETS: A CONVERSATION WITH JAMIE HERNANDEZ

Jaime Hernandez, co-author of the legendary comic book series Love & Rockets, will be joining Natalia Ramos Bellido for a conversation on the craft of comics and the series' legacy on the medium.

Jamie Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime’s work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and RocketsLos Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children’s book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.

February 5, 2024: LORENE CARY'S LADYSITTING: MONOLOGUE, DIALOGUE, AND DISCUSSION