< December 2000 January 2001 February>

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All events take place at the Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia (U of P).

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Monday, 1/1

• Happy New Year! The Writers House is closed until Tuesday, January 16. Programs and House-use will resume then. We look forward to seeing you soon.

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Monday, 1/15

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day : Writers House closed

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• Virtual Book Group 6 for Penn alumni and Penn families starts today and continues through February 15. Click here for details.

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Tuesday, 1/16

• Spring classes begin

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 12:00-1:30 PM in Room 202: English 009.301 (Gautier)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 88 (Filreis)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in Room 202: English 293/AMES 359 (Gold)
• 1:30-4:30 PM in Room 209: English 145.301 (Hendrickson)
• 3:00-4:30 PM in Room 202: English 135 (Kuriloff)

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Wednesday, 1/17

• 5:00 PM: Planning Committee Meeting and Gathering

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 202: English 155.301 (Hendrickson)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 209: English 115 (Cary)

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Thursday, 1/18

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 12:00-1:30 PM in Room 202: English 009.301 (Gautier)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 88 (Filreis)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in Room 202: English 293/AMES 359 (Gold)
• 3:00-4:30 PM in Room 202: English 135 (Kuriloff)

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Friday, 1/19

• 4:00 PM: Suppose An Eyes, A Poetry Working Group. Suppose An Eyes is a poetry workshop group open to anyone in the Philadelphia community. Supposer's meet once a month to read and share new writing by memebers of the group. New members are welcome. Please bring 8 copies of your poem along to share and discuss.

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Saturday, 1/20

• 1:30-3:30 PM: Saturday Reading Cooperative, a literacy-enrichment program for second-graders from Lea Elementary School
• 4:00 PM: The Laughing Hermit Reading Series presents readings by Geraldine Connolly and Elaine Terranova
  Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1947, Geraldine Connolly grew up in Westmoreland County and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh. She worked on the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 1971-1975 and attended graduate school at the University of Maryland where she received an M.A. She has received two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, one in 1987 and one in 1995. In 1988, she received a Works-in-Progress grant from the Maryland Arts Council and in 1990, a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Chautauqua Institute. Her chapbook, A Red Room, was published by Heatherstone Press in 1988 and a full-length collection, Food for the Winter, by Purdue University Press in 1990. Province of Fire (Iris Press) appeared in 1998. She recently co-edited The Open Door: An Anthology of Work from Poet Lore. Her poems, reviews and essays have appeared widely in literary magazines, including Antioch Review, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest. She serves as executive editor of Poet Lore magazine. She teaches poetry at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and at John Hopkins' Washington D.C. Graduate Writing Program.

  Elaine Terranova is the author of two books of poems, The Cult of the Right Hand (Doubleday, l99l), which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Damages (Copper Canyon Press, l996). "The Choice," a poem from Damages, will appear on buses and subways in Philadelphia as part of the Poetry Society's Poetry in Motion project. Her translation of Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis is part of Euripides 3 in the Penn Greek Drama Series (l998). She received a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship in Literature in l997 and has won two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. She held the Robert Frost Fellowship in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in l992. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Parnassus and other magazines. A number of her poems have been anthologized. She teaches English and creative writing at the Community College of Philadelphia and at the Curtis Institute of Music. She was Bannister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in l996 and has taught poetry writing at the Writers' Center of Chautauqua Institution, at the Rutgers University and Hofstra University Writers Conferences, and at the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival.

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 1/21

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 1/22

• 8:00 PM: Live at the Writers House: a one-hour word and music radio show. Join us in the live audience! This one-hour "preview" show will feature just a few of the writers who are involved in the hundreds of readings and programs happening at Writers House and around the city in the spring. Come hear work by Daisy Fried, Anita Thakkar, Sandra Chin, Gena Heng, Van Tu, Three Stories High, Holly Bittner, Laura Bardwell, David Sanders, Elizabeth Scanlon, and Kathy Lou Schultz. Find out what these writers and musicians are involved in in the coming months.
• 7:30-10:00 PM in Room 209: The Fish Writing Group

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 2:00-5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 285 (Filreis)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 202: English 381.401 (Cary)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 209: English 135.302 (Rile)

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Tuesday, 1/23

• 6:00 PM: Five members of the Writers House Planning Committee attend a dinner with alumnus and journalist Joe Klein, sponsored by the Fox Leadership Program

• 6:00-8:00 PM: Mellon Writing Group First Gathering of the Semester

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 12:00-1:30 PM in Room 202: English 009.301 (Gautier)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 88 (Filreis)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in Room 202: English 293/AMES 359 (Gold)
• 1:30-4:30 PM in Room 209: English 145.301 (Hendrickson)
• 3:00-4:30 PM in Room 202: English 135 (Kuriloff)
• 6:00-8:00 PM throughout the House (every functional public room): Mellon Writing Group Gathering
• 8:00-9:00 PM in Room 202: Film Advisory Board

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Wednesday, 1/24

• 6:00-7:00 PM: WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHING IN THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION; AN UNDERGRAD TESTS THE WATERS: A reception celebrating Blake Martin's photography and writing, displayed in the living room during the month of January. From Blake: "Last semester, I documented the life, past and present, of Dr. Ellis Sacks. While the project stemmed from the class "WRITING in the Documentary Tradition," I also took PHOTOGRAPHS. Hanging in the living room of the Writers House are those photographs, accompanied by some of the text from the written documentary. I hope you'll join me on Wednesday night (January 24), around 6ish, to experience the work and to say hello."

• 8:00 PM: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes, an open mic performance night

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 202: English 155.301 (Hendrickson)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 209: English 115 (Cary)

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Thursday, 1/25

• Johanna Drucker is a printer and a scholar whose scholarship centers on visual representations of language and the history of experimental poetry, the alphabet, and artists' books. She is the author of The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (Thames and Hudson, 1995); The Century of Artists' Books (Granary Books, 1995); and The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (University of Chicago Press, 1994). She is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

  Charles Alexander's books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press, Tucson, 1990) and arc of light / dark matter (Segue Books, New York, 1992), Pushing Water: parts one through six (Standing Stones Press, Morris, MN, 1998), and Pushing Water: part seven (Chax Press, Tucson. 1998), and Four Ninety Eight to Seven (Meow Press, San Diego, 1998). He edited Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language, & the Book Arts (Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1996). He is the founder and director of Chax Press in Tucson, Arizona. During this event, Charles Alexander read from a poem then in progress, "Near or Random Acts." In 2004 the poem is being published as a book by Singing Horse Press (2004), available from Small Press Distribution.

  This event was co-sponsored by the University of the Arts, Singing Horse Press, and the Kelly Writers House.

  • the whole program 1:02:30 (RealVideo)
  • Charles Alexander, "Near or Random Acts" (0:04:55) (MP3)
  
  
• 5:30 PM: The Jewish Studies Program, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Kelly Writers House host a reading and book signing featuring Kathryn Hellerstein, who recently co-edited Jewish American Literature and David Ruderman, who recently published Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2000). For more information, call 215-898-7332.
  Dr. Kathryn Hellerstein teaches Yiddish Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Educated at Wellesley, Brandeis, and Stanford, Hellerstein is well-known as a poet and a translator, as well as a scholar of Yiddish poetry. Hellerstein's books include her translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern's poems, In New York: A Selection, (J.P.S., 1982) and Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky (Wayne State Univ. Press, 1998). Most recently, she is co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (W.W. Norton, 2000). As a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she spent the academic year 1999-2000 in Jerusalem, working on a project on women Yiddish poets. She is also a major contributor to American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (U. of Cal. Press, 1986). Her own poems have appeared in Poetry, Tikkun, Bridges, and the anthologies Without a Single Answer (Judah Magnes Museum, 1990), Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality (Beacon, 1992), Reading Ruth (Ballantine, 1994), and Nice Jewish Girls: Growing Up in America (Penguin, 1996). Her many scholarly articles on Yiddish literature, and most recently, on women poets in Yiddish, are published in journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books.
  Dr. David Ruderman is the Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham B. Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati, Ohio, Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), for which he received the JWB National Book Award in Jewish History in 1982, Kabbalah, Magic and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1988), and A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham Ben Haniniah Yagel (Philadelphia, Pa., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). He is co-author, with William W. Hallo and Michael Stanislawski, of the two volume Heritage: Civilization and the Jews Study Guide and Source Reader (New York, Praeger, 1984), prepared in conjunction with the showing of the Public Television series of the same name. He has edited Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York, New York University Press, 1992), Preachers of the Italian Ghetto (Los Angeles and Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992), and most recently [with David Myers] The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998). His other recent books are Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995) and the revised Hebrew edition of A Valley of Vision (Jerusalem, Shazar Institue, 1997). His forthcoming book Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key will be published by Princeton University Press in 2000. Professor Ruderman was educated at the City College of New York, the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He received his rabbinical degree from the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Jewish History from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1975. Prior to coming to Penn, he held the Frederick P. Rose Chair of Jewish History at Yale University (1983-94) and the Louis L. Kaplan Chair of Jewish Historical Studies at the University of Marland, College Park (1974-83), where he was instrumental in establishing both institutions' Judaic studies programs. At the University of Maryland he also won the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award in 1982-83. Professor Ruderman's area of specialization is medieval and early modern Jewish history and thought. He was born in New York in 1944 and is married with two children.

• 8:00-10:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Hollywood Club meeting

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 12:00-1:30 PM in Room 202: English 009.301 (Gautier)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 88 (Filreis)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in Room 202: English 293/AMES 359 (Gold)
• 3:00-4:30 PM in Room 202: English 135 (Kuriloff)
• 8:00-10:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Hollywood Club meeting
• 8:00-10:00 PM in Room 202: Penn Philosophy Circle

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Friday, 1/26

• 12:00-1:00 PM in Room 202: Greenhouse Project. The Greenhouse Project is co-sponsored by 88.5 WXPN and the Kelly Writers House.
  WXPN and Kelly Writers House are teaming up to create The Greenhouse Project -- an opportunity to leap through the noise and hype of "web design" and discover how to really get the most out of the web for your work, your organization or your mission. In ten weekly sessions we will "greenhouse" about six web-based projects (either existing websites in need of overhaul, or totally new ideas proposed by the group) through discussion, expert visits, and hands-on training. You can find out more about The Greenhouse Project here.

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Saturday, 1/27

• 1:30-3:30 PM: Saturday Reading Cooperative, a literacy-enrichment program for second-graders from Lea Elementary School

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 1/28

• 11:00 PM: Live at the Writers House airs on 88.5 FM WXPN. Tune in to an hour of Philly-based writing and music. This one-hour "preview" show features just a few of the writers who are involved in the hundreds of readings and programs happening at Writers House and around the city in the spring. Come hear work by Daisy Fried, Anita Thakkar, Sandra Chin, Gena Heng, Van Tu, Three Stories High, Holly Bittner, Laura Bardwell, David Sanders, Elizabeth Scanlon, and Kathy Lou Schultz. Find out what these writers and musicians are involved in in the coming months.

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 1/29

• 6:00 PM: Graduate Student Creative Reading, organized by Matt Merlino and featuring the work of Matt Hart (poetry), Carolyn Jacobson (performance text), Kathy Lou Schultz (poetry), Amina Gautier (short fiction), Louis Cabri (poetry), Sayumi Takahashi (poetry), Solade Thorpe (poetry), and Matthew Merlino (poetry).

  Listen to an audio recording of this program.

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 2:00-5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 285 (Filreis)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 202: English 381.401 (Cary)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 209: English 135.302 (Rile)
• 6:30-7:30 PM in Room 202: SCUE Information Session (Amy Simmerman)
• 8:00-10:30 PM in Room 202: LINKS, a Jewish dialogue group

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Tuesday, 1/30

• 5:30-7:00 PM in Room 202: First meeting of the Workshop for Nonfiction Writers
  The first meeting of the Workshop for Nonfiction Writers will take place on Tuesday, January 30, from 5:30-7:00 PM in Room 202 at Writers House. The group is just getting started, so if you're interested and would like to participate both in the group and in how it's structured, please join us! The group is conceived as being especially for non-fiction writers who have been published, or are serious about trying--and willing to plug away and endure the frustrations of the job. It's open to writers of books, articles for magazines or newspapers, and professional journals. Members of the group are expected to give thoughtful critiques and, as far as possible, suggest publishers and markets. The group will meet monthly on Tuesday evenings. Manuscripts will be distributed over e-mail and critiqued at each meeting.
  The Workshop for Nonfiction Writers is being convened by Sylvia Auerbach, a freelance writer and editor. Auerbach has written many popular magazine articles, and has had five books published on various topics: personal finance for women, auctions, relationships between parents and adult children. She is currently writing a humorous book about midlife. She was an editor of Publishers Weekly and taught feature writing at several major New York universities, and at Temple University in Philadelphia. From 1987 to 1990 she was director of the Book Publishing Institute at Penn.

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 12:00-1:30 PM in Room 202: English 009.301 (Gautier)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: English 88 (Filreis)
• 1:30-3:00 PM in Room 202: English 293/AMES 359 (Gold)
• 1:30-4:30 PM in Room 209: English 145.301 (Hendrickson)
• 3:00-4:30 PM in Room 202: English 135 (Kuriloff)
• 5:30-7:00 PM in Room 202: First meeting of the Workshop for Nonfiction Writers
• 8:00-9:00 PM in Room 202: Film Advisory Board

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Wednesday, 1/31

• 5:00 PM in Room 202: The 20th Century Reading Group hosts a presentation by Michele Richman
  Michele Richman, professor of Romance Languages at Penn, will be discussing the introduction to her recently completed book manuscript entitled Toward a Sacred Sociology. Copies of the paper are available in the graduate English office, 115 Bennett Hall. Professor Richman's project examines the influence of Durkheim on the group of writers, led by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, who began collectively working as the College de sociologie in the late 1930s. The immediate concern of the those writers was to elaborate an activism focusing "the relevance of myth, power, and the sacred to the fascist menace," producing thereby a revolutionary ethnography aimed at exploding social forms that conceived the constitution of unity as their purpose. The sacred thus became the central principle involved in the interrogarion of the "specificity of the social." The College de sociologie, importantly, insisted on a reflexive dimension within their work, understanding the inevitability of contagion of that work by the power of the sacred, but at the same time conceiving of the sacred as a force that could both undermine and support the social order. Michele Richman traces the development and revisions of the conceptualization of the sacred within the College, arguing in conclusion that sacred sociology may be seen to be vindicated by the events of May '68 and their lasting influence on French social activism.

• 6:00 PM: "Readings of Conscience" Join us for a participatory group celebrating the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other writers who have pursued social justice. Please contact Writers House at wh@writing.upenn.edu to indicate if you would like to participate or for more information. This program is offered as a part of the 2001 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Celebration and Symposium on Social Change. For a full listing of programs, go to www.upenn.edu/aarc/Events2001.html.

• 8:00 PM: First meeting of the semester of Manuck Manuck: A Fiction Writing Group

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Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.


• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 202: English 155.301 (Hendrickson)
• 2:00-5:00 PM in Room 209: English 115 (Cary)
• 5:00-8:00 PM in Room 202: 20th Century Reading Group hosts a presentation by Michele Richman
• 8:00-10:00 PM in Room 202: Manuck-Manuck, a fiction writing group

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