April 2024

Monday, 4/1

A reading by Harryette Mullen

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in person

rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

Harryette Mullen is a poet and professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned a BA from the University of Texas and a PhD from the University of California Santa Cruz. Her collections of poetry include S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), Recyclopedia (2006), and Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (2012). Her various honors and awards include fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester. She was also the recipient of a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry. She describes her work as “writing for the eye and the ear at once, at the intersection of orality and literacy” (The Poetry Foundation).

Tuesday, 4/2

A conversation with Harryette Mullen

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

10:00 AM in person

rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

Wednesday, 4/3

The American Poet Laureate: A Conversation with Amy Paeth and Robert Casper

Creative Writing Program

12:00 PM in person

hosted by: Julia Bloch

cosponsored by: Kauders Fund

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Amy Paeth's new book The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the US since World War II. Paeth's award-winning book is the first history of the national poetry office, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. Her book is also a history of how state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Paeth describes how interactions between the CIA, the State Department, the NEA, and literary organizations and private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly, led poetry to play a uniquely important role in the cultural front of the Cold War. Joining Paeth in conversation will be Robert Casper of the Library of Congress.

Amy Paeth is a lecturer in critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching courses in writing, literature, and cultural studies. The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) is her first book. It received the Northeast Modern Language Association’s Annual Book Award.

Robert Casper is the head of Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress, where he has worked since 2011. He divides his time between Brooklyn, NY, and Washington, DC.

Imani Davis, e.jin, and Wes Matthews

Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program

6:00 PM in person

cosponsored by: the Excelano Project

rsvp: register here to attend in person

e.jin is an adoptee writer who is based in New York. They have received nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Nashville Review, The Shade Journal, and others. They are a Roots. Wounds. Words., Lambda Literary, and AAWW Margins Fellow.

Wes Matthews is a poet and essayist from the westside of Detroit whose work has appeared in 68to05, Gulf Coast, Muzzle, Beloit, TEDx, PBS News Hour, and elsewhere. He served as the 2018-19 Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate and received congressional recognition for "outstanding and invaluable service to the community." Wes graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023 with a degree in anthropology and religious studies. He is currently working on a Masters of Theological Studies (MTS) degree at Harvard Divinity School.

Imani Davis is a queer, Black, & neurodivergent writer from Brooklyn. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Mellon Foundation, Lambda Literary, StoryStudio Chicago, and the Stadler Center for Poetry, they’re currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Harvard, where they also earned their M.A. in English. Imani holds a B.A. in English and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania as well. It was at Penn, & at Kelly Writers House specifically, where they became a proud member of The Excelano Project. Imani’s poetry appears with The Academy of American Poets, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour's Brief But Spectacular series, The Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Shade Literary Arts, The Offing, Brooklyn Poets, Poetry Daily, Frontier Poetry, Honey Literary, TEDx, ROOKIE magazine, and elsewhere. Notably, they have performed at the Teen Vogue Activism Summit, the Apollo Theater, Brave New Voices, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Nuyorican Poets Café. Imani misses their friend Jamie very much.

Thursday, 4/4

Friday, 4/5

Saturday, 4/6

Sunday, 4/7

Monday, 4/8

Mira Jacob: reading and conversation

6:00 PM in person

hosted by: Piyali Bhattacharya

register here to attend in person

Hosted by Creative Writing Faculty member Piyali Bhattacharya, this event is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, the Center for the Advanced Study of India, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Creative Writing Program, Fine Arts and Design, and the Creative Ventures Program at the Kelly Writers House.

Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, nominated for three Eisner Awards, and named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. It is currently in development as a television series. Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, and the Telegraph. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School and a founding faculty member of the MFA Writing Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She is currently working on We Killed Anji Alexander (Ecco, 2026), a kaleidoscopic novel about the murder of a white-passing Indian actress. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

Tuesday, 4/9

Wednesday, 4/10

Thursday, 4/11

Singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo

in conversation with Antony DeCurtis

5:30 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

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.

Friday, 4/12

Saturday, 4/13

Sunday, 4/14

Monday, 4/15

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Brave Testimony Poetry Reading

5:30 PM in person

hosted by: the Center for Africana Studies

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country.

For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making.

In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his New York Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Tuesday, 4/16

Investigating Homelessness

A conversation with Dennis Culhane and Jennifer Egan

12:00 PM in person

co-sponsored by: The Department of English

moderated by: Julia Fischer (C'24) and Ella Sohn (C'26)

rsvp: register here to attend in person

What kinds of stories do we tell — do we need to tell — about homelessness in the US in 2024? How can investigative journalism and social-scientific research combine forces to capture the present situation and future dimensions of homelessness? What role do the lives, experiences, and idea of unhoused populations play in the public understanding and policy implications of this social problem? Please join us for an open panel discussion of these questions and more, featuring Dennis Culhane (Dana and Andrew Stone Professor of Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice) and Jennifer Egan (award-winning novelist and journalist; Artist in Residence at the Penn English Department). Lunch will be served.

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America and is currently Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Also a journalist, her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September, 2023.

Dennis Culhane is the Dana and Andrew Stone Professor of Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, and Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP) initiative, a MacArthur-funded project to promote the development and use of integrated data systems by state and local governments for policy analysis and systems reform. He is also the former Director of Research for the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Culhane’s primary area of research is homelessness and assisted housing policy. His research has contributed to efforts to address the housing and support needs of vulnerable populations experiencing housing emergencies and long-term homelessness. He holds a PhD in Social Psychology from Boston College.

Elysha Chang and Abbey Mei Otis: A Reading

Creative Writing Program

6:00 PM in person at the Kelly Writers House

hosted by: Julia Bloch

register here to attend in person

Join the Creative Writing Program for an evening with two fiction writers practicing at the cutting edge of their craft. Current Artist in Residence Abbey Mei Otis, whose short story collection Alien Virus Love Disaster was a finalist for the Philip K Dick Award, will be joined by Elysha Chang, author of the debut novel A Quitter’s Paradise. After the reading, Abbey and Elysha will open the floor to a Q&A about current trends in contemporary fiction.

Elysha Chang is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn. She has taught creative writing at Blue Stoop Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University. A graduate of Columbia’s MFA Program, she has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction and Kundiman. Her short works explore otherness, displaced desire, and the Asian American experience. These works have been published in Center for Fiction Magazine, Fence, GQ, The Rumpus, and others. A Quitter’s Paradise is her first novel.

Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller and a firestarter, raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. Her story collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster (Small Beer Press) was named one of the best science fiction books of the year by the Washington Post, and was a finalist for the Philip K Dick Award. She has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Tin House, Millay Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Hedgebrook, and the McKnight Foundation. She studied creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers and the Clarion West Writers Workshop. At Penn she is an Artist-in-Residence, and is working on a novel of climate catastrophe and post-mass-incarceration.

Wednesday, 4/17

Thursday, 4/18

Annual KWH marathon reading

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

3:00 PM - 9:00 PM (or until the book's done)

To help read, sign up here

Join 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. Want to help read? Sign up here

Friday, 4/19

Saturday, 4/20

Sunday, 4/21

Monday, 4/22

New Translations from Kharkiv, Ukraine: Katerina Derysheva

12:00 PM in person

hosted by: Kevin M.F. Platt

register here to attend in person

Katerina Derysheva is a displaced poet from Kharkiv, Ukraine and currently poet-in-residence in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and the Department of Russian and East European Studies at Penn. Derysheva’s poetic work balances on the border between phenomenological and linguistic research, propelled by examination of everyday and technical language. This bilingual event will present Derysheva’s work in the original Russian and in new English translations. Derysheva will be joined by her translators Ryan Hardy, Andrew Janco, Olga Livshin, Asher Maria, and Kevin M. F. Platt.

Katerina Derysheva is a Ukrainian poet from Kharkiv. She is co-founder and organizer of the kntxt literary project. Her poems and translations have been published in the journals: Plume, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literatur in Bayern, Visions, Volga, The Colon, Literature, Articulation, New Coast, Arion, Homo legens, Kreshchatik, and others. She is the author of the books Starting Point (2018), There Will Be No Installation (2023); co-author of the book Earth Time (Romania, 2020). Her poems appeared in the anthology In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Carolyn Forche. She was long-listed for the Arkadiy Dragomoshchenko Prize (2019) and is laureate of the Europa Mai Prize (2022). Her poems and essays have been translated into 11 languages. She has held fellowships and residencies at Villa Concordia (Bamberg), LCB (Berlin), “La Factorie” (Normandy, 2023), and Villa Sarkia (Sysmä, Finland, 2023), and others.

Tuesday, 4/23

Wednesday, 4/24

Thursday, 4/25

National Epics

an event in honor of Professor David Wallace

5:00 PM in person at the Kelly Writers House

featuring: Professor Herman Beavers in conversation with David Wallace, Christopher Atwood, Rita Barnard, Thadious Davis, Deven Patel, D. Vance Smith, and Michael Solomon

rsvp: register here to attend in person

What is the role of cultural and literary objects in the formation of nationhood? This is the subject of Professor David Wallace’s forthcoming volume (Oxford University Press), which features more than ninety contributors from around the world. Please join us for a lively discussion of the “national epic,” which will include short readings from a range of literatures that have come to represent national aspirations, identities, and struggles. Visit National Epics for more information about the book and a related collaborative digital project.

Friday, 4/26

Saturday, 4/27

Sunday, 4/28

Monday, 4/29

A reading by Maggie Nelson

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in person

rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

Maggie Nelson is a poet, scholar, and nonfiction writer who currently teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. On top of her many publications, she has received grants and fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is the author of poetry collections Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull press, 2005), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose Press, 2001). She has also written genre-defying collections of lyrical prose, including The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Bluets (Wave Books, 2009). The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and was a New York Times best-seller. She earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 1994 and a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2004.