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February 2011

Tuesday, 2/1

A lunch talk with poet Charles Alexander

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: email wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event on PennSound

Charles Alexander is the founder and director of Chax Press, in Tucson, where he has lived all but three of the past 27 years. His books include Hopeful Buildings (Chax 1990), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (Segue 1992), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction 2007), which includes 30 sections of the ongoing work Pushing Water, which is expected to be published in its entirety in 2011. He is recipient of the distinguished Arizona Arts Award, and is a former director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, of Black Mesa Press, and of the Tucson Poetry Festival. Book arts works by Alexander are included in collections at the Getty Museum Library, the State University of New York at Buffalo Poetry Collection, the New York Public Library, the University of Wisconsin Special Collections Library, the University of Arizona Special Collections Library, the Stanford University Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and at other major collections nationally and internationally. In the summer of 2007 he was a participant in the TAMAAS poetry translation seminar in Paris, France. He is currently at work on a book about the pleasures of poetry.


A poetry reading by Nate Mackey

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Tsitsi Jaji
co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program, the English Department, the Center for Africana Studies, and the English Undergraduate Program
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event on PennSound

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fourth and most recent volume is Bass Cathedral (New Directions, 2008) and whose first three volumes have been published together as From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1-3 (New Directions, 2010); and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor (with Art Lange) of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993). His awards and honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1993, election to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2001, the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem in 2006 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 2/2

Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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!

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 2/3

Cecilia Vicuña

a screening of Kon Kon

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 on PennSound

In the documentary poem, Kon Kon, Cecilia Vicuña returns to Con Con, the birthplace of her art in Chile where the sea is dying and an ancient oral tradition is disappearing. Con Con is located at the mouth of the Aconcagua River whose source is the glacier of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. Named for Kon, the oldest deity of the Andes, it has been a sacred oracle site for millennia, associated with the most renowned oracle site of the Americas: Pachacamac on the coast of Peru. The word Con (Kon) alludes to the sanctity of the cycle of water – from glacier to ocean to cloud – a circularity intensified by the repetition: Con Con. In the sacred Valle del Aconcagua, the "bailes chinos" created a powerful mystical sound: the "sonido rajado" (torn sound), a multiphonic music of the pre-Columbian Andes. Based on dissonance, the "bailes chinos" are a collective trance dance to increase the life-force of land and water. Continuously performed throughout colonial times, the dance is now dying along with the sea. Exploring the forgotten meaning of the ancient names, the artist recovers an erased cultural memory. In this hybrid work, part poem, part documentary, Cecilia Vicuña creates new bridges between the ancestral and the avant-garde.

Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña is the author of eighteen poetry books, published in Europe, Latin America and the US. She performs and exhibits her work widely. Since 1980 divides her time between Chile and New York. She recently co-edited the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, New York, 2009. A precursor of conceptual art in Latin America, and an early practitioner of the improvisatory oral performance, her "precarious" installations in nature and multimedia works deal with the interactions between language, earth and the symbolic function of textiles. Her films and videos have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Art in General, New York, The Museum of Pre Columbian Art, Chile, Museo Etnográfico de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, The Brooklyn Museum of Art and at the Cinarchea International Film Festival, Kiel, Germany, Museo Reina Sofia en Madrid, y Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona. Visit www.ceciliavicuna.org to find out more.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 2/4

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 2/5

Sunday, 2/6

Monday, 2/7

A Talk by Michael Davidson

"Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes"

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Charles Bernstein
co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program and EDIT: Processing Improvisatory Writing Technologies
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event on PennSound

Michael Davidson has written more than a half dozen books of poetry as well as numerous historical, cultural and critical works. He has been affiliated with the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) since 1974 and as a professor of American literature since 1988 with areas of study and research in Modern Poetry, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Disability Studies. Davidson has written extensively on disability issues, including "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body," GLQ 9:1-2 (2003), and "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation," in Beyond the Boundary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. His essays on disability are collected in Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan). His critical work, Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, is scheduled for publication in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. Davidson is known for insightful literary criticism, his work in disability studies, and for the meticulous editing of the monumental George Oppen, New Collected Poems.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 2/8

Revolution Girl Style Again

a Kerry Prize panel discussion

organized by Grace Ambrose

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the KWH Kerry Prize, SPEC Fully Planned, SPEC Connaissance, Creative Writing Program, and the Music Department
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Author Sara Marcus will read from her critically acclaimed Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution and moderate a discussion among legendary Riot Grrrl musician Kathleen Hanna, activist and founder of Exotic Fever Records Katy Otto and the founder of Girls Rock! Philly, Beth Warshaw-Duncan. Topics will range from discussion of the panelists own participation in the movement to what women in music can and should be doing today. A concert at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut) will follow, featuring Philadelphia bands Trophy Wife and Cat Vet, as well as Providence's Whore Paint, with all proceeds benefiting the Girls Rock! Philly organization, which encourages teenage girls to pick up instruments and start bands.

Kathleen Hanna is a NYC artist best known for her groundbreaking performances as the singer of the seminal 90's punk band, Bikini Kill and her more recent, highly acclaimed multimedia group Le Tigre. She was a pivotal figure in what became known as 'Riot Grrrl', a feminist movement that took place within the underground music scene between 1900-1996. She is currently gearing up for the release of a performance based documentary called Le Tigre: On Tour, writing a new album and doing work surround the recent donation of her papers to the Fales Archive at NYU.

Sara Marcus is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn. Her book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution was published by Harper Perennial in October 2010. Marcus's prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Salon, Bookforum, Artforum.com, Time Out New York, The Advocate, EOAGH, Encyclopedia, Tantalum, The Art of Touring, and Heeb, where she was the politics editor for five years. She is a cofounder of New Herring Press, a collectively run micropress focusing on prose chapbooks. She received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

Katy Otto recently relocated to Philadelphia after living in Washington, DC. Ms. Otto has over a decade of experience in fundraising for violence prevention, women's issues, youth development, and arts organizations. She started playing drums when she was 17 and has not gone one week without them since. At 22, she and two friends founded the independent label Exotic Fever Records, which just celebrated ten years and over forty internationally distributed indepedent releases. She has done contract development work creating grassroots fundraising plans and authoring proposals for social justice organizations nationally. Katy has toured the country several times playing drums in her former band Del Cielo. Her current band, Trophy Wife, just released a full length debut, Patience Fury, on 307Knox Records. She co-founded the national Visions in Feminism conference. She was a member for over twelve years of the group Positive Force DC, a volunteer punk collective that organizes concerts and events for social change and plans community actions. She has done radical sexual assault prevention and survivor solidarity work and workshops.

Beth Warshaw-Duncan is the line producer at the NPR music program The World Café. She has also been the production director of WXPN, a noncommercial radio station in Philadelphia, and has edited live sessions with bands, directed live & recorded shows, & edited in soundproof studios all day (and all of the night). She is also a board member of the 215 Festival in Philadelphia, is certified as a secondary-school teacher in Pennsylvania & has taught Writing For Radio at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as sound & recording workshops for the Black Lily Film & Music Festival. After volunteering for two years as a counselor & workshop instructor at Willie Mae Rock Camp in New York, Beth founded & is the executive director of Girls Rock Philly, a rock & empowerment camp where girls ages 9-17 learn instruments, write songs & form their own bands. Girls Rock Philly held its first camp session in August 2007 & is a founding member of the international Girls Rock Camp Alliance.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 2/9

A Reading by Phillip Lopate

Bob Lucid Memorial Program in Fiction

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Max Apple
co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943. He has written three personal essay collections—Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). His most recent books are Two Marriages (novellas, Other Press, 2008), Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009), and At the End of the Day: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010). He has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two NEA grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the NYU Institute for the Humanities. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he has taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, New York University, Hofstra University, the New School and Bennington College. He is now a Professor in the graduate division at Columbia University.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 2/10

RealArts@Penn presents Ashley Parker

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Anthony DeCurtis

Ashley Parker is a reporter for the New York Times and a distinguished Penn alum. While at Penn she won both the Rolling Stone Journalism Award and the Nora Magid Prize. She was hired as Maureen Dowd's assistant at the Times, and, to the surprise of no one who knew her in school, soon became a hilarious recurring character in her boss's award-winning op-ed columns. In her own writing and reporting, Parker has defined a smart, sly voice, whether analyzing with anthropological zeal the arcane language of her younger sister ("The Ling"); chatting with then Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama, for a profile of his ever-present "body man" Reggie Love; or limning the works and days of "All the Obama 20-Somethings" for the Sunday Times Magazine. Parker will be discussing her work at the Times, and the thrills and perils of forging a career in the fraught world of contemporary journalism.

A lunch talk with Stephen Metcalf

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Al Filreis
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Stephen Metcalf s a columnist at Slate, where he is the host of Culture Gabfest. After several years spent in a PhD program at Yale, Metcalf's enthusiasm for a profession with radically un-normalized career outcomes and extremely few jobs, and in which the one compensatory perk --tenure --was being withheld from new entrants, waned, and he moved to NYC to be a freelance writer. While struggling to find a voice unaddled by literary theory and too many years in grad school, he worked several anonymous if shabby-chic literary jobs, eventually catching on as a speechwriter for Hilary Clinton's first Senate campaign. Metcalf has also written for TNR, the Nation, and Times Magazine. He is at work on a book-length polemic on the 1980s.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 2/11

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 2/12

Sunday, 2/13

Monday, 2/14

A reading by Susan Cheever

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: seating strictly limited; please rsvp to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.

Susan Cheever has published five novels and seven works of nonfiction ranging from memoir to literary history to psychological investigation. Cheever's writing is at once engrossing and unsettling, funny and heartbreaking. Home Before Dark, her memoir of her father, the legendary fiction writer John Cheever, is bravely honest yet shows a narrative restraint that would elude a less skilled writer. Her most recent book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, explores the boundaries between passion and addiction in a provocative yet tempered, lucid manner.

Cheever's 2006 book American Bloomsbury, a portrait of the community of transcendentalist writers in and around 19th century Concord, was on the Boston Globe's best-seller list for many months and has been lauded as a penetrating look at the lives of some of America's most important writers. Cheever's forthcoming book, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, due for publication in November 2010, continues this vivid, humane examination of the woman—a working writer, civic intellectual and headstrong daughter whose communal and familial struggles inform choices many young women face today.

Cheever's work has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and was awarded the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Authors Guild Council, the winner of an Associated Press Award and a director of the Yaddo Corporation. Cheever has taught at Yale, Hunter College, and the New School, and she is on the faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Known for emotional intensity and compassion in her work, Cheever has earned a reputation as one of America's most respected nonfiction writers. Writing about Desire, Kelly McMasters of Newsday has said that Cheever "puts herself under the microscope here because no one else was willing, and she does so with grace."

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 2/15

A brunch conversation with Susan Cheever

Kelly Writers House Fellow

10:00 AM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: seating strictly limited; please rsvp to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 2/16

Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

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!

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 2/17

A poetry reading by Eleni Sikelianos

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Marcella Durand
listen: to an audio recording of this event
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a hybrid memoir (The Book of Jon, City Lights) and six books of poetry, the most recent being Body Clock. She has been the happy recipient of various awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she has participated in a number of international poetry festivals, most recently the Centre National du Livre's Belles Etrangères reading tour of France. Sikelianos currently teaches in the Creative Writing PhD program at the University of Denver.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 2/18

Marathon Reading of Mrs. Dalloway

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch part 1: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
watch part 2: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
watch part 3: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
watch part 4: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

We're taking the doors off their hinges for the fifth annual Marathon Reading. All afternoon and into the evening, the Writers House community will read Virginia Woolf's modernist classic, Mrs. Dalloway, in its entirety, in shifts. Expect pink cakes, toffee, high tea, and flowers – lots of flowers – for a party that will be extraordinarily amusing. Don your mackintosh or bowler and please send a message to wh@writing.upenn.edu if you're interested in reading.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 2/19

Sunday, 2/20

Monday, 2/21

Hub Meeting

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: jalowent@writing.upenn.edu

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 2/22

A lunch with Stephanie Sherman of Elsewhere

presented by the Creative Ventures series

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: to wh@writing.upenn.edu
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

The Creative Ventures series supports creative collaborations across discipline, emphasizing evolution and innovation, convergence, creative process, and imagination.

The Kelly Writers House is excited to welcome Stephanie Sherman from Elsewhere, a living museum, international residency program, and education laboratory set within a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. Rethinking site-specific art, the role of the museum, modalities of learning and knowing, emergent processes, and collaborative practice, Elsewhere invites creatives across media to continually rebuild a museum from the circulating inventory of a former store. Elsewhere blends a context for global exchange with a focus on sustainable local connections and collaborations. For all of you interested in events planning, non-profit art, collaborative environments, inter-media creations, and philosophies come to life, Stephanie will be here for a free lunch program to talk about founding and building the Elsewhere experience. To find out more about Elsewhere and the living museum, go to http://elsewhereelsewhere.org/.

"The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers... artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, big-picture thinkers...." —Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind

Brodsky Gallery Opening

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 2/23

Spoken Nerd Revolution

a book party for Shappy Seasholtz

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

Shappy Seasholtz was the surly barkeep at the Bowery Poetry Club for its first eight years, and slam-master & host of their weekly poetry slam, NYC-Urbana. He & the NYC-Urbana Team won the 2002 National Poetry Slam. He has toured with Lollapalooza, was featured on season three of HBO'S Def Poetry and has been running the National Nerd Slam for over a decade. He tours constantly and publishes widely. He is the chosen one.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 2/24

New Jewish Writing

featuring Shahar Bram, Jessica Greenbaum, Bob Perelman, and Rivka Fogel (C'11)

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: Zeek: a Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, the Jewish Studies Program, and Writers Without Borders
listen: to an audio recording of this event


Shahar Bram
Jessica Greenbaum
Bob Perelman
Rivka Fogel

Shahar Bram is a poet, scholar, and translator. He teaches Hebrew & Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, specializing in theory and American literature. He is the author of The Ambassadors of Death: The Sister Arts, Western Canon and the Silent Lines of a Hebrew Survivor (translated by Batya Stein), A Backward Look: The Long Poem in the Writings of Israel Pincas, Harold Schimmel and Aharon Shabtay (The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005), and Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead: An Essay on Poetry (translated by Batya Stein, Bucknell University Press, 2004), among other works. His books of poetry include: Walls (Nahar Books, 2008), The Blooming of Memory (Am-Oved, 2005) and City of Love (Carmel Publishers, 1999). His essays, articles and translations have been published in literary journals such as Word & Image, Partial Answers, Connotations, and Salamander.

Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn where she lives, finally. A graduate of Barnard College and an initiating graduate of the University of Houston's Writing Program, she has worked as a business reporter for Forbes Magazine, a researcher for The Anti-Defamation League's Civil Rights Division, an English Dept adjunct, and as an editor for a magazine-on-tape for people who are visually impaired. She is presently the chief domestic scientist for a family of husband and two teenage girls, and poetry editor of the Massachusetts based annual, upstreet. Her first book, Inventing Difficulty, won the Gerald Cable Prize, and poems from her second manuscript have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Torah: A Woman's Commentary, CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Nextbook and . . . ZEEK. She is the founder of Foot Traffic Presents, which sells home-made muffins to passersby for charities benefiting girls and women in the third world (mostly), and which raised $1,500 in its first eleven weeks. Last year she was a runner-up to be Brooklyn's Poet Laureate, and that's a good thing because it sounds like it would have been the hardest of all her non-paying jobs to date.

Bob Perelman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published 19 books of poems, including: IFLIFE (2006, N.Y: Roof); Playing Bodies, in collaboration with painter Francie Shaw (2004, N.Y.: Granary); and Ten to One: Selected Poems (1999, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press). His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (1996, Princeton University) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (1994, University of California). His work can be accessed on Penn Sound.

Rivka Fogel is finishing up her last semester at Penn, where she is the Behrman scholar at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Her work has been published in various journals including Peregrine and The Brighton Post, and has been featured in Institute of Contemporary Art publications and Arts in the City Crawl. She has poetry forthcoming in The Penn Review and in ZEEK, for which she is also a contributing editor. A past features writer for The Jewish Week, Rivka writes on contemporary art for Art Observed, and was the editor-in-chief of The Kedma Journal, Penn's journal on Israel and Jewish culture. She focuses much of her own research on religion in postwar language theory, and was awarded grants from the Penn English Department and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to travel to Jerusalem, where she studied language theory in Orthodox Judaism. Her most recent project, LOL_face, is a web index of identity.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 2/25

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 2/26

Sunday, 2/27

Monday, 2/28

A lunch program with Matt Katz

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Dick Polman
rsvp:wh@writing.upenn.edu
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Matt Katz, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, covers New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a rising national star on the GOP scene. From 2008 until this past January, he wrote about Camden, NJ, one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in America, and authored a four-part series about the failure of New Jersey's unprecedented seven-year takeover of city government. In the summer of 2010, Matt went to Afghanistan, where he covered the U.S. military's efforts at reconstruction under fire. Before coming to the Inquirer, Matt was a municipal and education reporter for the Daily Record in North Jersey and later the Courier-Post in South Jersey, where he also wrote a dating column, "The Bachelor Pad," that was syndicated nationally by Gannett Newspapers. Matt is a native of Queens and Long Island, and he graduated from George Washington University in Washington DC.

LIVE at the Writers House presents The Leeway Foundation

a live taping featuring Catzie Vilayphonh, Dr. Tanji Gilliam, Monique E. Hankerson, Lorelei Narvaja, Benita Cooper, and musical guest Emily Ana Zeitlyn

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe


Catzie Vilayphonh
Dr. Tanji Gilliam
Monique E. Hankerson
Lorelei Narvaja
Benita Cooper

The Leeway Foundation, which began in 1993 as a foundation dedicated to supporting women artists in the Philadelphia area, is committed to art making as an integral part of social change, to movement building, and anti-oppression work where Leeway is accountable, accessible, part of and governed by, the communities Leeway's programs support.

Leeway is guided by the values of fearlessness in action, speech, and self-examination and commits to breaking down boundaries and barriers with creativity, respect, and openness to the process.

Leeway funds women and trans artists creating social change.

Catzie Vilayphonh, 2010 Arts and Change Grantee, will create "Laos in the House," an innovative writing and performance workshop. The show will promote and provide an accessible art form via live storytelling among Lao American refugees in Philadelphia.

Dr. Tanji Gilliam, 2010 Arts and Change Grantee, has a created a project entitled "do you have any scars?/The Architecture of Violence". It is a photography, video, and literary project that gives voice to women who have been impacted by domestic violence, broadly defined. Tanji hopes that this work will encourage other circles and communities of black women and promote dialogue and inspire healing.

2010 Arts and Change Grantee Monique E. Hankerson will produce A Voice That Bears a Likeness to My Soul, a photographic and poetic journey that will document the story of ten homeless LGBTQ youths in Philadelphia. She hopes to shed light on homelessness and force people to become advocates of those in need.

Lorelei Narvaja, 2010 Arts and Change Grantee, will document an oral and photographic history of her Filipino female relatives in the United States – those who immigrated and those who were born here – exploring their experiences assimilating and resisting Western culture, the dichotomy of a traditional or Western life, and the notions of success and beauty.

2010 Arts and Change Grantee Benita Cooper will facilitate "Seniors Storytelling Day", an interactive performance art event bringing Philadelphia teenagers and seniors together to collaborate on documenting and re-telling the stories of the seniors. Benita hopes to develop a stronger sense of community by building a common ground for understanding between generations.

Emily Ana Zeitlyn was born on a kitchen table in Fairmount Park in the seventies. She has been making music and art in Philadelphia since then. (And gardens and culinary happiness and a baby!) Emily has recorded and toured under the moniker of The Weeds for the past ten years, working closely with producer Devin Greenwood on album and performance projects. The songs are musically spare, lyrically rich and emotionally volcanic and often make people cry. She has toured nationally sharing the bill with many wonderful folk including; Mirah (Yom Tov Zeitlyn), Birdie Busch, Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening), The Microphones. The long awaited follow up album to The Faraway Flying of Broken Beating will be released from the dark studio this summer, longing for sun upon its pale face.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)