January 2012
Sunday, 1/1
Monday, 1/2
Tuesday, 1/3
Wednesday, 1/4
Thursday, 1/5
Friday, 1/6
Saturday, 1/7
Sunday, 1/8
Monday, 1/9
Tuesday, 1/10
Wednesday, 1/11
- 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM in Room 202: Penn and Pencil, a writing group for Penn and Health Systems Staff. If you're a Penn employee and want to work on your creative writing, contact Karen Murphy at ktmurphy@mail.med.upenn.edu
Thursday, 1/12
Friday, 1/13
Saturday, 1/14
Sunday, 1/15
Monday, 1/16
Tuesday, 1/17
Emergency poetry reading
presented by the Emergency Reading Series
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event via PennSound.
Emergency is designed to address several questions we see arising in contemporary North American poetry around issues of emergence and literary community. We've created an ongoing dialogue among working poets on how they think about poetic lineage, theoretical stances, and aesthetic practice. The series was launched in 2006 with support from the Kerry Sherin Wright Prize for programming at Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, an award designed to support a project that demonstrates aesthetic capaciousness and literary communitarianism. All readings are held in Philadelphia and available online at PennSound. Emergency is curated by Sarah Dowling.
Diana Hamilton's first book, Okay, Okay, is forthcoming from Truck Books. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Model Homes, Esopus, The Recluse, ASBDQ and mid(rib), among others. She is currently a graduate student at Cornell University.
Tarannum Laila received her MA in English and Creative Writing from Temple University. Her work has appeared in The Daily Star, The Independent, Holiday, Plume, Prolog and Forge. She is the winner of the William Gunn Fiction Award and she was a finalist for Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award.
Kareem Estefan is a recording surface that talks and performs, too. He's emitted words and sounds on the radio (WNYU, free103point9, NPR), in web archives and magazines (UbuWeb, BOMBlog, PennSound), and in more or less physical spaces (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Bowery Poetry Club, The Poetry Project). He studies art criticism and writing at the School of Visual Arts.
- 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in Room 209: Suppose an Eyes, a poetry group. For more information, contact Pat Green at patricia78@aol.com.
- 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM in room 202: Pennomicon writing group. For more information, contact pennomicon@comcast.net
Wednesday, 1/18
Speakeasy Open Mic
8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
Speakeasy is an open mic night held at the Kelly Writers House every other Wednesday evening. It's an opportunity for writers to share their work, or the work of others, in a friendly setting. Speakeasy was founded in 1997 and continues to be an important part of the regular Writers House programming series. We welcome poets, storytellers, singers, musicians, and anything in between to share their voices with us in the Arts Cafe twice a month. As always: Poetry, prose, anything goes!
Thursday, 1/19
Bug Time Working Group (Formerly Flash Fiction Mob), Session #2
featuring Nathaniel Lumpkin and J. Gordon Faylor
7:30PM in the Arts Cafe
facilitated by: Thomson Guster
We're back! Come one, come all to the second meeting of the BUG TIME WORKING GROUP, formerly known
as the FLASH FICTION FLASH MOB.
Local writers Nathaniel Lumpkin and J. Gordon Faylor will each lead their own writer's workshop-in-miniature, guiding the group through unconventional approaches to create a collection of finished micro-works over the course of two 45-minute sessions. Enjoy this opportunity to create bizarre & enjoyable writings on the spot, in good cheer and good company! Light refreshments will be served.
All writings produced by the Bug Time Working Group will be collected into an anthology and made available over the web and in a commemorative print edition, which participants will receive free-of-charge as they become available.
Whether you think of yourself as a "writer" or not, we're sure that you've got some creative urges you're dying to indulge. Join us as we explore some unconventional ways of approaching writing, exercises that will push you a little outside your usual frame of mind and free you up for some exciting creative possibilities. It'll definitely be more than a little silly, but you can't look dignified while having fun, y'know?
Nathaniel Lumpkin is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was born in California, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. He likes blackberry ice cream, red ribbons, Philadelphia, and the moon.
J. Gordon Faylor is the editor of Gauss PDF (gauss-pdf.com), a publisher of digitally-based works. He is the author of Sebaceous Heph (2010, bas-books) and Docking, Rust Archon (forthcoming, bas-books); other projects can be downloaded at jqua.net.
Friday, 1/20
Saturday, 1/21
Sunday, 1/22
Monday, 1/23
LIVE at the Writers House
with musical guest Honey Watts
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the Kelly Writers House and WXPN FM (88.5). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc.
 Susanna Fry |
 Ryan Eckes |
 Michelle Taransky |
 Anne-Adele Wight |
 Carl Cheeseman |
 Liz Fullerton |
Susanna Fry continues to map her geography through walking, writing, and practicing kundalini yoga in Philadelphia. In the past several years, she has taught writing in a variety of settings including a homeless shelter, Baptist church, and correctional facility. Susanna has published poems in such journals as Boog City, How2, Five Fingers Review, among others. She is the Associate Director of the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ryan Eckes was born in Philadelphia in 1979. He's the author of Old News (Furniture Press 2011) and when i come here (Plan B Press 2007). More of his poetry can be found on his blog and in various magazines.
Michelle Taransky is the author of Barn Burned, Then, selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. Taransky works at Kelly Writers House, as Reviews Editor for Jacket2 and teaches poetry and writing at University of Pennsylvania.
Anne-Adele Wight has written two chapbooks and some indefinable constructions. She is Vice President of the series Poets and Prophets and works as a freelance developmental editor. Her new book, Sidestep Catapult, was published recently by BlazeVOX Books. She is worried about the fate of the biosphere and hopes for a reversal, but doesn't count on it. Sidestep Catapult is an expression of that concern.
Raised in Mexico and California, Liz Fullerton has fronted the trip-hop outfit Dutch and contributed to Jedi Mind Tricks records. But in Honey Watts she strikes out to give her folk and country roots their fair due, sharing stories of love lost and adventures sought. And while she shares a biographical intensity with Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, Liz sings with the passionate desperation and whimsical playfulness of Nina Simone, Patsy Cline and Minnie Riperton. While straight forward in content, it's the delivery of her lyrics that penetrates even the most passive listener. Carl Cheeseman is a New Jersey-born composer and musician, performing and recording with The Minor Arcana, Johnny Miles & the Waywards, Dawn Hiatt, and Birdie Busch, among others. His proficiency in electric guitar and lap steel, and passion for dulcimer and sitar, have made Carl an in-demand studio session player, as well as collaborator with poets, storytellers, theater companies and filmmakers. Together, along with acclaimed producer Jeff Hiatt and some of the area's most in-demand studio musicians, the duo created a deeply personal record to add into the new-folk canon. The self-titled album, released in April 2011, sets Liz's songs into a musical fabric of muted tones and soft noises; some are given a simple acoustic presentation, but the record is also by turns ambient and electric, gently orchestrated and even experimental. Adventurous elements found on records by Nina Nastasia, Laura Gibson, Devon Sproule and Sharon Van Etten are identifiable upon multiple listens. And it was named a top ten album by Fred Knittel, host of XPN2′s Folkadelphia.
Tuesday, 1/24
Heled Travel Grant presentation by Katie Sanders
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
As a way of memorializing her mother, Terry B. Heled, and of honoring the students of her alma mater in gratitude for the encouragement her own research and writing received while she was at Penn, Mali Heled Kinberg (C'95) created the Heled Travel Grant program at the Kelly Writers House that, each summer, enables a student to travel for the purpose of conducting the research that will lead to a significant writing project.
Wednesday, 1/25
Feminism/s presents Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
Feminism/s is an interdisciplinary series exploring how art, criticism, political action, and community building can create structural and cultural solutions to gender hierarchies. Feminism/s aims to give voice and consideration to the (macro) micro that surround contemporary feminisms in all their pluralities. Feminism/s supports conversation, analysis, philosophy and community connection related to structural and cultural solutions to the gender hierarchy. Feminism/s is a group-curated series supported by the Fund for Feminist Projects at Kelly Writers House.
Melissa Gira Grant enjoys blogs and bloggers. She's written about sex and the Internet for Slate, The Frisky, $pread magazine, and Valleywag, and has contributed to the anthologies Dirty Girls, Best Sex Writing, and Girl Crush. She has an apartment in Brooklyn; her typewriter is in San Francisco.
Meaghan O'Connell moved to New York four years ago to be a live-in nanny. Since then she has interned at 826NYC, learned the Internet as Jonathan Coulton's assistant, written in coffee shops all over Brooklyn, and started a blog on Tumblr, where she now works as the director of outreach. This is her first publication.
Coming & Crying is an anthology of true stories about sex, edited by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell, published by their press, Glass Houses.
Thursday, 1/26
Mind of Winter
featuring: Sam Apple, Kate Herzlin, Diamond Irwin, Zoe Kirsch, Leslie Krivo-Kaufman, Rolf Potts, Lindsey Todd, and Al Filreis
5:30 in the Arts Cafe
In January of every year, the Writers House Planning Committee embraces the post-holiday doldrums with a celebration of winter's comforts, inspired by Wallace Stevens's chilly poem, "The Snow Man." We gather here at the Writers House, stoke a big fire in the parlor, simmer several big pots of soups and stews, and share our favorite winter-themed readings with one another. Let it snow! Please RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM.
- 7:00 to 8:30 PM in Room 202: A meeting of the Lacanians. For more information, contact Patricia Gherovici at pgherovici@aol.com.
Friday, 1/27
Saturday, 1/28
Sunday, 1/29
Monday, 1/30
A MEETING OF THE WRITERS HOUSE PLANNING COMMITTEE (THE "HUB")
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp: jalowent@writing.upenn.edu
From the time of its founding in 1995-1996, the Kelly Writers House has been run more or less collectively by members of its community. Our original team of intrepid founders—the group of students, faculty, alumni, and staff who wanted to create an independent haven for writers and supporters of contemporary writing in any genre—took for themselves the name "the hub." "Hub" was the generic term given by Penn's Provost, President, and other planners who hoped that something very innovative would be done at 3805 Locust Walk to prove the viability of the idea that students, working with others, could create an extracurricular learning community around common intellectual and creative passions. To this day, the Writers House Planning Committee refers to itself as "the hub"—the core of engaged faculty, student, staff, and alumni volunteers from whom the House's creative energy and vitality radiates.
Tuesday, 1/31
A poetry reading by Murat Nemet-Nejat
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event via PennSound.
Poet, translator and essayist, Murat Nemet-Nejat's most recent work includes the poem
The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman House, 2011), the translation of the Turkish poet Seyhan
Erozçelik's Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman House, 2010), and the memoir/essay "Istanbul Noir"
(in Istanbul: Metamorphoses In an Imperial City, Talisman House, 2011).
Nemet-Nejat's translation of the Turkish poet Birhan Keskin's book Y'ol (Ro(a)de)
will be published in 2012. He is presently working on "Things," part VI of the seven part poem,
"The Structure of Escape," of which The Spiritual Life of Replicants is part V.
Murat Nemet-Nejat in the last few years also edited and largely translated Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House, 2004), translated Orhan Veli, I, Orhan Veli (Hanging Loose Press, 1989), and Ece Ayhan, A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Sun and Moon Press, 1997). He is the author of the essay The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integers Press, 2004), the poems "steps" (Mirage, 2008), "Prelude" (2009), "I Did My Best Work During a Writer's Block" (First Identity, 2009), "Disappearances" (Zen Monster, 2010), and the collaboration with Standard Schaefer, Alphabet Dialogues/Penis Monologues (Karaub, 2010).
- 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in Room 209: Suppose an Eyes, a poetry group. For more information, contact Pat Green at patricia78@aol.com.
- 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM in room 202: Pennomicon writing group. For more information, contact pennomicon@comcast.net