January 2025
Wednesday, 1/1/2025
Thursday, 1/2/2025
Friday, 1/3/2025
Saturday, 1/4/2025
Sunday, 1/5/2025
Monday, 1/6/2025
Tuesday, 1/7/2025
Wednesday, 1/8/2025
Thursday, 1/9/2025
Friday, 1/10/2025
Saturday, 1/11/2025
Sunday, 1/12/2025
Monday, 1/13/2025
Tuesday, 1/14/2025
Wednesday, 1/15/2025
Thursday, 1/16/2025
Friday, 1/17/2025
Saturday, 1/18/2025
Sunday, 1/19/2025
Monday, 1/20/2025
Tuesday, 1/21/2025
A Conversation with Kristen Martin (C'11)
Author of The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
hosted by: Jamie-Lee Josselyn (C'05)
Photo Credit: Blake Martin
Jamie-Lee Josselyn (C’05) will host a conversation with journalist and cultural critic Kristen Martin (C’11) about her debut book of narrative nonfiction, The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. The real history of being an orphan in America is nothing like the myth, and nothing like the American dream. Through a combination of in-depth archival research, memoir (Martin herself lost both her parents when she was quite young), and cultural analysis, The Sun Won't Come out Tomorrow is a compellingly argued, compassionate book that forces us to reconsider autonomy, family, and community. In this book, Martin delivers a searing indictment of America's consistent inability to care for those who need it most.
Kristen Martin (C'11) is a writer and critic based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, NPR, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her debut narrative nonfiction book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, will be published by Bold Type in January 2025.
Wednesday, 1/22/2025
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
Poetry, prose, anything goes
7:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You'll have three minutes at the podium to perform. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, you award-winning essay, or your flash fiction to share.
Thursday, 1/23/2025
Mind of Winter
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Soups! Stews! Wintery readings! Every January, the people of the Writers House welcome everyone back to campus with “Mind of Winter,” a celebration of the season’s comforts inspired by Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Snow Man.” Join us at 5:30 PM, when we’ll gather here at the KWH for delicious homemade soups and stews, followed by winter-themed readings selected by KWH community members. Let it snow!
Friday, 1/24/2025
Saturday, 1/25/2025
Sunday, 1/26/2025
Monday, 1/27/2025
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, 1/28/2025
Muriel Rukeyser's "Waking This Morning"
A special live recording of PoemTalk, with Jane Malcolm, Kathy Lou Schultz, and Evie Shockley
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Hosted by KWH Faculty Director Al Filreis, PoemTalk features a lively roundtable discussion of poetry in the PennSound archive. Please join us in the Arts Café for a special episode of PoemTalk about Muriel Rukeyser, featuring Jane Malcolm, Kathy Lou Schultz, and Evie Shockley. All are welcome! Lunch will be served.
New poems for the new year
A reading by members of the Suppose an Eyes workshop
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Join us for a reading by members of Suppose an Eyes, a poetry workshop s ponsored by the Kelly Writers House. The workshop takes its name from a "portrait" in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. Suppose An Eyes has two main goals: to provide a supportive place for poets to share and improve their writing and to organize readings where poets can present their work to the public. The group was founded in 1999 and is one of the longest running poetry workshops in the Philly area. The group has a diverse membership with poets of all ages and from a variety of backgrounds.
Wednesday, 1/29/2025
The Beauty of Choice
A reading and conversation with Wendy Steiner
5:30 PM in person
hosted by: Heather Love
co-sponsored by: the Wolf Humanities Center, the English Department, and the Fund for Feminists at the Writers House
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at Penn, will read from her latest book, The Beauty of Choice, then sit down with Heather Love, Penn Professor of English, to discuss the ways in which taste, beauty, and pleasure intersect in defense of women’s freedom. In The Beauty of Choice, Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values. Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature — expressions of their taste — and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art.
Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania, past Chair of the Penn English Department, and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum (now, the Wolf Humanities Center). Her most recent books are The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom (2024); The Real RealThing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010); Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001); and The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (listed in the “NY Times 100 Best Books of 1996”). Steiner’s cultural criticism has appeared widely, and she is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, and Royal Society of Canada. Steiner’s six opera libretti have been composed by Paul Richards, Frances White, and Mark Rimple. The latest, using both her text and her photography, premiered in New York in 2024, Upon Reflection: An Opera in Ten Images, starring soprano Sherezade Panthaki and the musicians of Parthenia. Steiner has presented multimedia installations in the 2019 and 2022 Venice Biennales.
Heather Love, a Professor in Penn’s English Department, is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently working on a new project ("To Be Real,”) concerning the uses of the personal in queer writing.
Thursday, 1/30/2025
KWH PRIZE-WINNER PRESENTATIONS
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
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.
Leo Biehl is a senior from Buffalo, NY majoring in Urban Studies and Political Science. Over his time at Penn, Leo has studied housing policy, worked as an architecture intern, and conducted research on community land trusts. Leo’s Wexler Family Prize project examines the disruptive impact of urban renewal initiatives on one building: Boslover Hall, once the headquarters of a prominent Jewish organization and a second home for Philadelphia's Hispanic and Black communities.
Armie Chardiet is a writer, editor, and translator. When they are not doing one of those three things you can often find them running around Philadelphia or running quickly in circles around a track. This is their last semester at Penn and they will be receiving a master’s and bachelor’s degree in English. With a Heled Travel and Research Grant, Armie developed a documentary exploring the intersection of the natural world, the body, and the runner as a subject.
Mmachi Ezigbo (C'27) is an undergraduate in the College studying Neuroscience and minoring in Creative Writing and Medical Sociology. Her love of reading has shaped her life, igniting her passion for writing, and leading to the formation of Pen to Paper, a writing group dedicated to uplifting the creative voices of diverse writers. Through the Kerry Sherin Wright Prize, Mmachi helped the writing workshop Pen to Paper expand its mission and launch an "Evening with an Author" series.
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. At Penn, she co-founded The Woodlands Magazine and was a features writer and editor at 34th Street Magazine. She is the 2024–2025 Junior Fellows Prize winner at the Kelly Writers House, developing a project that focuses on personal essays and reported memoir about grief, loss, and mental illness.
Irma Kiss (C’25) received the Universe in Verse Prize to write a poetry chapbook on the history of reproductive medicine. Her project centers on the use and misuse of the speculum, asking how a humble medical instrument can be made to stand for centuries of care — but equally, abuse. She is a senior in the College studying History of Art and Comparative Literature.
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.
Wahid Sarwar (C'25) is a senior studying English and Cinema Studies. He's a lover at heart. He loves to take long walks. He also loves lasagna. He also loves to bake. He also loves playing Tetris. He also loves eBay shopping. He also loves the state of New Jersey. He also loves music artists like Lexa Gates, Erykah Badu, and Billie Marten. He also loves to grow out his hair. One thing he forgot to mention: he especially loves working at the Kelly Writers House!" With the Goldstein Prize, Sarwar worked on Halal Alam's, a play that chronicles a dysfunctional Bangladeshi American family and the shenanigans that occur when the late patriarch, Mr. Alam, suddenly passes away.