Saturday, 2/1/2025
Sunday, 2/2/2025
Monday, 2/3/2025
Poet Joshua Bennett
in conversation with Carlos Andrés Gómez
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) — which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022) and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet, speaker, actor, and inclusion strategist from New York City. He is the author of Fractures, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Hijito, winner of the Broken River Prize and a #1 SPD bestseller, and the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood, released by Penguin Random House. A star of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, TV One’s Verses and Flow, and Spike Lee’s #1 box office movie Inside Man with Denzel Washington, Carlos is one of the highest booked acts in the history of the college market and among the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world. Carlos’ honors include the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Foreword INDIES Gold Medal, and the International Book Award. A genre-transcending multi-hyphenate, he partnered with John Legend on Senior Orientation, a program to counteract bullying and champion inclusive masculinity among high school students. Carlos is a proud father of two.
Tuesday, 2/4/2025
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.
Wednesday, 2/5/2025
Mystery novelist Jessica Goodman
in conversation with Kelsey McKinney
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Kelsey McKinney (Normal Gossip) will host a conversation with Jessica Goodman, bestselling author of They Wish They Were Us and The Counselors, about her latest page-turning murder mystery, The Meadowbrook Murders. Set at a prestigious New England boarding school, The Meadowbrook Murders is a gripping story about the inextricable way power, privilege, and secrets are linked — and how telling the truth can come at a deadly price.
Jessica Goodman is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Counselors, The Legacies, They’ll Never Catch Us, and They Wish They Were Us. She is the former op-ed editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. Her work has also been published in Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, The Cut, and Glamour. Follow Jessica on Twitter @jessgood and on Instagram @jessicagoodman.
Kelsey McKinney is a reporter and writer who lives in Philadelphia. She is the host of Normal Gossip as well as a co-owner and features writer at Defector.com. She has worked as a staff writer at Deadspin, Fusion, and Vox, and her reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and many others. Her first novel, God Spare the Girls, was published in the summer of 2021 by William Morrow.
Thursday, 2/6/2025
A CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST KATE GLASHEEN
Brodsky Gallery event
6:00 PM in person
curated and hosted by: Lila Shermeta
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a conversation with author-artist Kate Glasheen, followed by a reception and gallery opening. This first Brodsky Gallery show of the spring semester will feature original art from Glasheen's debut graphic novel Constellations. Set in 1980s Troy, New York, Constellations is a portrait of a queer teen living in the margins but determined to find their way ahead. Glasheen has created a world done in watercolor and ink, where strong lines meet soft color, and raw emotions meet deep thought in this story of hope, humor, and survival.
Kate Glasheen was born and raised in Troy, New York and lived there until their departure for Pratt Institute for a BFA in Fine Art. Kate has since been a creator, artist, and contributor for several critically acclaimed books, participated in exhibitions and collections across the globe, and worked on several of the biggest properties in entertainment. Their artistic interests find communion in fine and sequential art under the notion that there's something hilarious about something that's not funny at all. Constellations is their author-artist debut. Kate lives, draws, and tattoos out of Philadelphia under the stringent supervision of Kipper the Cat.
Friday, 2/7/2025
Saturday, 2/8/2025
Sunday, 2/9/2025
Monday, 2/10/2025
Profiles in Mental Health Courage with Henry Platt
A conversation hosted by Stephen Fried
12:00 PM in the Arts Café
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Henry Platt (‘21) is a singer, songwriter, and music industry professional. He currently works in Creative Services at Warner Chappell Music, helping songwriters and emerging artists to develop their careers. Outside of work, you can find Henry performing around New York, bored riffing on TikTok, and dedicating himself to mental health advocacy. He tells his powerful story of mental illness challenges while an undergrad at Penn, as one of the twelve characters in the new acclaimed book Profiles in Mental Health Courage by Patrick J. Kennedy & Stephen Fried.
Stephen Fried (’79) is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author who teaches at Penn and Columbia. His eight nonfiction books include the healthcare narratives Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia (1993), Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs (1998) and RUSH: Revolution, Madness and the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (2018), as well as the mental health and addiction books he co-authored with Patrick Kennedy, A Common Struggle (2015) and Profiles in Mental Health Courage (2024). He is teaching Writing About Mental Health and Addiction this semester. Fried lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.
PROFILES IN MENTAL HEALTH COURAGE, co-authored by Stephen Fried and Patrick Kennedy, takes an unflinching look at the experience of mental illness and addiction, introducing readers to people of many ages, backgrounds, pasts and futures, across politics and government, Hollywood and the arts, tech and business, sports and science — some recovering, some relapsing, some just barely holding on. Each of the twelve profiles in the book crystalizes a unique portrait of what it means to live with mental illness, addiction, or both. Those profiled use their real names, and allowed interviews with clinicians, family members and friends, and access to medical records.
Tuesday, 2/11/2025
A Conversation with Penn Press Editor Walter Biggins
Applebaum Editors and Publishers Program
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Julia Bloch
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join Julia Bloch in a conversation about academic publishing with Walter Biggins, who is editor in chief of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Biggins, who previously served as an executive editor at the University of Georgia Press and as an acquisitions editor at the University Press of Mississippi, acquires books in human rights, cultural studies of the U.S. and of the African diaspora, and print culture studies. The conversation will address current topics in academic publishing — including open access, peer review, nonprofit publishing models in a shifting media environment, reaching an ever-changing readership for titles across scholarly fields, and the challenges and rewards of working in nonprofit and mission-driven publishing.
Walter Biggins is editor in chief of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He acquires books in human rights, cultural studies of the U.S. and of the African diaspora, and print culture studies.
Wednesday, 2/12/2025
Penn and Pencil Club Reading
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
A reading of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, written by members of the Penn and Pencil club, a creative writing workshop for Penn staff from a variety of backgrounds and university departments.
Thursday, 2/13/2025
Chili Cook-Off
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to make chili or attend in person
It’s time for the revival of our annual Kelly Writers House Chili Cook-Off! Anyone can enter the competition and compete to win the title of best chili maker. The Cook-Off is open to teams and individuals. To participate, please make a big batch of your best chili and bring it to the KWH ready to eat by 5:30 PM for a community tasting. We’ll reimburse you up to $50 for ingredients (so hang on to your receipts).
Friday, 2/14/2025
Saturday, 2/15/2025
Sunday, 2/16/2025
Monday, 2/17/2025
Live at the Writers house
a monthly radio show produced in collaboration with WXPN
6:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration of the people of the Kelly Writers House and of WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, the Writers House records a one-hour show of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art for broadcast by WXPN. LIVE at the Writers House is edited by Zach Carduner and produced by Alli Katz. The show is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc.
Tuesday, 2/18/2025
Grieving Together
A conversation on making art about grief and loss
Jamie-Lee Josselyn and Janice Jenkins Tosto, with Meg Gladieux
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a conversation about writing, making art, and having more open discussions around grief and loss, particularly through writing and podcasts. The conversation will feature Janice Jenkins Tosto, an award winning author and the creator and host of Grief Journeys, a podcast where Janice interviews Philadelphians about experiences with grief and loss, which airs monthly on Germantown Community Radio, and Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Associate Director for Recruitment and an instructor for the University of Pennsylvania’s Creative Writing Program and the Director of the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House and host of Dead Parents Society, a podcast about writing about the loss of a parent. Janice and Jamie-Lee will be in conversation with Meg Gladieux (C'23, GED '24), 2024–25 Junior Fellow Prize winner, whose project focuses on personal essays and reported memoir about grief, loss, and mental illness.
Jamie-Lee Josselyn is Associate Director for Recruitment and an instructor in Penn’s Creative Writing Program. She is also Director of the Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House. She has been listed among Penn’s Top 30 Professors and has received the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring and the School of Arts and Sciences’ Platinum Award. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere and she has hosted the literary podcast Dead Parents Society. Jamie-Lee has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Bennington College.
Janice Jenkins Tostois the creator and host of “Grief Journeys,” a monthly radio program heard on Germantown Community Radio, G-town Radio, in Philadelphia, PA. Janice’s guests include grievers, grief counselors and therapists who share their personal experiences with grief and loss and talk about how people experience grief and loss in their unique ways. Guests have talked about the loss of parents, children, siblings, and pets. “Grief Journeys” is heard the last Friday of each month at 7 a.m. on gtownradio.com. You can find her on Instagram @griefjourneyshost.
Meg Gladieux is an educator and freelance writer. She currently works at Healthy NewsWorks, a non-profit which teaches journalism in Philadelphia-area schools, and as an assistant to author and journalist Stephen Fried, through which she helped work on the book Profiles in Mental Health Courage. At Penn, she co-founded The Woodlands Magazine, was a features writer and editor at 34th Street Magazine, and was part of the Body Electric poetry workshop. She is the 2024–2025 Junior Fellows Prize winner at the Kelly Writers House.
Wednesday, 2/19/2025
Translating Women Yiddish Poets
a conversation with Professor Kathryn Hellerstein
6:00 PM in person
hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Kathryn Hellerstein is Professor of Yiddish and past Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books of translations are: In New York: A Selection (Moyshe Leyb Halpern) and Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies and the 2015 Modern Language Association Fenia and Yaacov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She co-edited Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology and edited the selected essays of Irene Eber, Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions. Her co-edited volume, China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters, was published by De Gruyter in 2022. Hellerstein's current projects include Women Yiddish Poets: Anthology, which she translated and edited; China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the Twentieth Century; The Rosewaters and the Colmans: Jewish Identity in Two Cleveland Jewish Families (1840-1915); and Jewish Women Poets as Translators: Changing Liturgy and Canon.
Thursday, 2/20/2025
FIGURE AND TRADE: A POETICS BOOK LAUNCH
Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch
6:00 PM in person
co-sponsored by: the Department of English
hosted by: Josephine Nock-Hee Park
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch to celebrate the release of two new titles in poetry and poetics that offer exciting new discussions of what the study of form can reveal for us today. Julia's new book Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem (University of Iowa Press) is an analysis of race, gender, and the postwar long poem, and Sarah's new book Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern University Press) reads the recumbent figure across literature in dialogue with Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms. Both of these titles are deeply concerned with subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation - please join us for a lively discussion of where they overlap and diverge! This conversation will be hosted by Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Associate Dean for Arts and Letters and President's Distinguished Professor of English. All are welcome; reception to follow.
Julia Bloch is the author of Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem and three books of poetry. A Pew Fellow in the Arts, she directs the Creative Writing Program at Penn.
Sarah Dowling is the author of Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form, and Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, as well as three books of poetry. Sarah teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
Josephine Nock-Hee Park is Associate Dean for Arts and Sciences and President’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two monographs — Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008), Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford 2016) — and a short book, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Black and White (Cambridge Elements 2023).
Friday, 2/21/2025
Saturday, 2/22/2025
Sunday, 2/23/2025
Monday, 2/24/2025
[EVENT FULL] A reading by Patti Smith
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in person
rsvp required: event full
Patti Smith is a singer, songwriter, poet, and musician who rose to fame in the 1970s through the New York City–based punk rock movement. One of her most widely know songs, "Because The Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached 13th on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her memoir Just Kids, chronicling her early years in New York and relationship to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award in 2010. The Rolling Stone magazine ranked her 47th on a list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2010. Her other books include Woolgathering (1992), M Train (2015), Devotion (2017), and Year of the Monkey (2019).
Tuesday, 2/25/2025
[EVENT FULL] A conversation with Patti Smith
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in person
rsvp required: event full
Patti Smith is a singer, songwriter, poet, and musician who rose to fame in the 1970s through the New York City–based punk rock movement. One of her most widely know songs, "Because The Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached 13th on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her memoir Just Kids, chronicling her early years in New York and relationship to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award in 2010. The Rolling Stone magazine ranked her 47th on a list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2010. Her other books include Woolgathering (1992), M Train (2015), Devotion (2017), and Year of the Monkey (2019).