February 2022
Tuesday, 2/1
Late for Revision, drawings by Jen Wroblewski
A conversation with the artist
Brodsky Gallery Opening
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube
LFR 7, 14 x 11 inches. Graphite on paper. 2021.
Late for Revision is a group of small graphite drawings by Jen Wroblewski that investigate the peculiar capacity of line and mark to cohere into narrative that exists outside of syntactic structures. Liberated from the limitations of recognizable language, the line is free to offer a different narrative experience for the viewer/reader. Please join us for a conversation between artist Jen Wroblewski and artist and writer Etty Yaniv. Jen and Etty will talk about the drawings in the show and offer thoughts on the ways creative processes cross boundaries, mediums, and bodies. There will be space for a larger conversation within the group.
Jen Wroblewski (born California, 1973) is an artist, professor, and curator whose work is grounded in an interest in drawing as object and performance. Fluent in the histories of mark-making, she defines drawing as an accretion of marks, or as the relic of the physical act of drawing. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the NYFA in printmaking/book arts/drawing, and Aldrich Radius fellowship, and the A.I.R. Gallery fellowship. Her work and projects have been discussed in the New York Times, Hartford Courant, Brooklyn Rail, and NJ Star Ledger and many books and online publications. Exhibitions include Resistance Movement in collaboration with Kellie O'Dempsey at the Kentler International Drawing Space, Endogenic Flux Machine at Kansas State University, Timeless: the art of drawing at the Morris Museum, New Monuments to the AntiConcept at A.I.R. Gallery, and Draw to Perform 2 in London. From 2006-2016 she taught at the SUNY Purchase School of Art+Design, and she also designed and taught a descriptive drawing curriculum for designers at the University of the Arts and has been a visiting professor at many universities and studio programs. Her current project is Gold/scopophilia*, a contemporary art gallery in Montclair NJ where she shows work by artists who demonstrate idiosyncratic material fluency (and is comprised mainly of women.) Exhibitions at the gallery have been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, ANTEMag and ArtSpiel.
Etty Yaniv works on her art, art writing, and curatorial projects in Brooklyn. She exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including The Haifa Museum of Art, Israel, State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, Newark Museum of Art, NJ, Monmouth Museum of Art, NJ, Torrance Art Museum, CA, AIR gallery, Brooklyn, Sheen Cultural Center, NYC, Long Island University, Brooklyn, Purdue University, IN, UCONN University, Stamford, CT, Helen Day, VT, Musée Héritage Museum, St. Albert, CA, Zero1 Biennial in San Francisco, and Leipziger Baumwollspinnerie, Leipzig Germany. Her work is in institutional and private collections nationally and internationally, such as State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, The Foundation Center, NYC, ElephantArt, Switzerland, and other private collectors in USA, Israel and Canada. She was awarded the Two Trees studio program in 2018. She is running the online magazine Art Spiel.
Wednesday, 2/2
We All Feel Like It
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Hosted by: Michelle Taransky
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube
Twelve years after Michelle Taransky’s Whenever We Feel Like It series hosted its first “We All Feel Like It” reading in the Kelly Writers House Arts Café, the fifth “We All Feel Like It” reading will feature poets from the first-year class (Class of 2025) at Penn.
Thursday, 2/3
Franny Choi: reading and conversation
Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program
6:00 PM (ET) on Zoom
REGISTER HERE to attend on Zoom
Co-sponsored by: the Asian American Studies Program, Excelano Project, Creative Writing Program, and the English Department
In honor of their daughter Caroline, whose longstanding presence and participation in Penn's spoken-word community helped inspire a resurgence of oral poetry on campus, Steven and Nancy Rothstein (CW'75) established a fund to support an annual oral poetry program at the Writers House. Each year we host a program or project featuring oral poetry in one of its many forms: spoken-word, slam, or sound poetry, to name only a few possibilities.
Franny Choi is a queer, Korean-American writer of poems, essays, and more. Her most recent book is Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), a Rumpus and Paris Review staff pick that Lit Hub praised as "a profoundly intelligent work that makes you feel." It was a Nylon Best Book of 2019, was awarded the Elgin Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2020, and was a finalist for awards from Lambda Literary, Publishing Triangle, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Choi is also the author of the chapbook, Death By Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and the debut collection, Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2019.) She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has also received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University's Lewis Center. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the poetry podcast VS with Danez Smith.
Friday, 2/4
Saturday, 2/5
Sunday, 2/6
Monday, 2/7
A book launch for Weike Wang's Joan is Okay
A reading and Q&A, with Weike Wang and special guest Sully Burns
6:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube
Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful and laced with sharp humor, Joan Is Okay — the new novel by Weike Wang — touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese-American right now; working in medicine at a high-stakes time; finding one's voice within a dominant culture; being a woman in a male-dominated workplace; and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it's a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can't get her out of your head.
Weike Wang is the author of Chemistry (Knopf 2017) and the forthcoming Joan is Okay (Random House 2022). She is the recipient of the 2018 Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is in the 2019 Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prizes. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sully Burns is a Senior at Penn from Philadelphia, studying creative writing. He is currently writing his Senior thesis, a collection of short stories, for this spring. He loves writing fiction grounded in themes of food, city, and humor.
Tuesday, 2/8
Safia Elhillo and Angel Nafis: reading and conversation
hosted by Husnaa Haajarah Hashim
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
sponsored by: The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and the Fund for Feminist Projects at the Kelly Writers House
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2021), and the novel in verse Home is not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021). With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa's 2018 "30 Under 30." Her work has been translated into several languages and her commissions include Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland.
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented NYC at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman and with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Wednesday, 2/9
Thursday, 2/10
"Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism"
A conversation with author Andrew Zitcer, hosted by Jamila Medley
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
co-sponsored by: Creative Ventures, Penn Urban Studies Program, and Weitzman School of Design, Department of City & Regional Planning
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube
From the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual aid have shown that, though cooperation is variegated and ever-changing, it is also a form of economic solidarity that can help weather contemporary social and economic crises. Addressing this theme, Andrew Zitcer's new book Practicing Cooperation delivers a trenchant and timely argument that the way to a more just and equitable society lies in the widespread adoption of cooperative practices. But what renders cooperation ethical, effective, and sustainable? Providing a new conceptual framework for cooperation as a form of social practice, Practicing Cooperation describes and critiques three U.S.-based cooperatives. Through these case studies, Zitcer illuminates the range of activities that make contemporary cooperatives successful: dedicated practitioners, a commitment to inclusion, and ongoing critical reflection. He asserts that economic and social cooperation must be examined, critiqued, and implemented on multiple scales if it is to combat the pervasiveness of competitive individualism.
Andrew Zitcer is an associate professor of Urban Strategy at Drexel University. He studies cooperative social and economic practices as well as the arts as a vehicle for community transformation. He is also the co-founder of the Rotunda, a community arts venue, and Kol Tzedek Synagogue, a progressive Jewish congregation.
Jamila Medley is an organizational development consultant, leadership coach, and educator/advocate for the solidarity economy. From 2012-2021 she served in governance roles and then as executive director of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA). Jamila, a UPenn alum, lives in Philadelphia's Mt. Airy neighborhood and serves on the boards of directors of Food Co-op Initiative, Movement Alliance Project, All Together Now PA, and the Independence Public Media Foundation.
Friday, 2/11
Saturday, 2/12
Sunday, 2/13
Monday, 2/14
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:00 PM in the Arts Café
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Join us for a meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (also known as "the Hub") — the core group of engaged students, staff, faculty, and volunteers who help make things happen at Writers House. Anyone is welcome to become a Hub member by participating in Hub activities and helping out. Members of the Hub plan programs, share ideas, and discuss upcoming projects.
Tuesday, 2/15
Wednesday, 2/16
SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT
7:30 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: on YouTube
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You'll have three minutes at the Kelly Writers House podium to share what you want!
Thursday, 2/17
A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel
A celebration of a new anthology edited by Laynie Browne
6:00 PM on YouTube
watch: on YouTube
Please join us to celebrate the publication of the anthology, A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's novel, edited by Laynie Browne, with contributors Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Julia Bloch, Marcella Durand, John Keene, Jena Osman and Brandon Shimoda. Does such a form as a poet's novel exist? Participants will present their thoughts on the prose of Etel Adnan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Thalia Field, Fernando Pessoa and Gertrude Stein. Katya Buresh writes of this collection in Full Stop, "A Forest on Many Stems" successfully captures the craft and intent that went into a kaleidoscope of poet's novels, each of them unique yet united by their author's desire to create a new space within narrative for their words and, in some cases, their existence."
 Rachel DuPlessis |
 Julia Bloch |
 Marcella Durand |
 John Keene |
 Jena Osman |
 Brandon Shimoda |
From 1986-2012, she wrote her long poem Drafts; beginning in 2015, her Traces, with Days is in process; Rachel Blau DuPlessis has just completed a book-length critical study called A Long Essay on the Long Poem (Alabama, forthcoming). Forthcoming also is her Selected Poems, 1980-2020 from CHAX.
Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. Her most recent book of poetry is The Sacramento of Desire. She is the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and she directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Marcella Durand is the author of To husband is to tender, Black Square Editions, 2021; The Prospect, Delete Press, 2020;Area, Belladonna* Books, 2008; and Traffic & Weather, Futurepoem, 2008. She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Earth's Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, was published by Black Square Editions in 2020.
John Keene is the author, co-author & translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021) and the fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2016). His awards include a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He teaches and serves as a department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.
Jena Osman's most recent book of poems is Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). Other books include Corporate Relations(Burning Deck, 2014), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She co-founded and co-edited Chain magazine with Juliana Spahr. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Brandon Shimoda is a yonsei poet/writer, and the author most recently of The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018). He co-edited, with Thom Donovan, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014). His book on the afterlife f Japanese American incarceration received a Creative Nonfiction grant from the Whiting Foundation, and is forthcoming from City Lights.
Friday, 2/18
Saturday, 2/19
Sunday, 2/20
Monday, 2/21
A reading by Amitav Ghosh
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
in collaboration with: the Center for Experimental Ethnography
watch: on YouTube
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He is the author of two books of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a collection of essays, and ten novels, including Circle of Reason (1986), The Glass Palace (2000), his Ibis trilogy of novels, and Gun Island (2019). For his groundbreaking writing he has received the Prix Médicis étranger, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke award to name just a few of many, and holds four honorary doctorates. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India's highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. His most recent publication is Jungle Nama (2021), an adaptation of a legend from the Sundarban, with artwork by Salman Toor.
Tuesday, 2/22
A conversation with Amitav Ghosh
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:30 AM in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
in collaboration with: the Center for Experimental Ethnography
watch: on YouTube
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He is the author of two books of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a collection of essays, and ten novels, including Circle of Reason (1986), The Glass Palace (2000), his Ibis trilogy of novels, and Gun Island (2019). For his groundbreaking writing he has received the Prix Médicis étranger, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke award to name just a few of many, and holds four honorary doctorates. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India's highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. His most recent publication is Jungle Nama (2021), an adaptation of a legend from the Sundarban, with artwork by Salman Toor.
Wednesday, 2/23
Dance and the poetics of diaspora
7:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
Hosted by: Dahlia Li
watch: on YouTube
How can words render the roving worlds of dance and the ever-fluctuating communities of diaspora? To be diasporic means to be scattered from one's presumed homeland while to be in dance entails attunement to the moving rhythms of the world. This series brings together emerging diasporic artists for whom dance offers a way of articulating an embodied poetics of being in a disorienting world. Taking the linguistic elusiveness of performance and embodied experience as an occasion for finding new words, we'll see what language forms when diasporic bodies hail each other in the present.
Dahlia Li is a trans Chinese diasporic artist and writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily out of dance, poetics, and moving image practices that explore histories of diaspora and alternative cosmologies of the erotic. She is finishing a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania where her dissertation, Caress without Body, is a series of performance ethnographies on dance as embodied diasporic technology. Additionally, she is writing a book-length collection of personal essays that explores psychoanalysis, time, gendered embodiment, and the fleshly afterlives of 20th century Asian wars and revolutions. She collaborates extensively with dance artists Be Heintzman Hope, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Yin Mei.
John Maria Gutierrez is a multidisciplinary actor, dancer, creator, and educator who
performs on screen and stage, nationally and internationally. Originally from the small island of Manhattan, John was
raised in a hood commonly known as “Little Dominican Republic,” or Washington Heights, and has spent most of their life on
Lenape land.
John combines acting, b-boy, and postmodern aesthetics with original music, singing, and experimental
theater to unwind a complex urban disparity brought on by social and systemic failings. His work reaches for healing and dialogue within
a world actively facing, reflecting, and surviving global colonization and systemic oppressions. As the first person in
their family born in the US, John is carving out and balancing their own identity within their family, cultural history,
and artistic expression.
Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn, New York. She creates performances that investigate how black folks’ cultural, familial, and personal histories are embedded in their bodies and influence their everyday and performative movement. She aims to incite critical engagement with embodied black history as a means to imagine black futurity. Her work has been presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, Lewis Center for the Arts, La Mama Courthouse, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. She currently serves as Head of Movement for Drama at Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan and is adjunct faculty in the Dance MFA at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English, Dance, and Theater from Princeton University.
Thursday, 2/24
Heled Travel Grant Presentations: Grace Leahy and Ian McCormack
12:00 PM (ET) on YouTube
This program is online only
watch: on YouTube
Heled Travel and Research Grants enable students to travel and conduct research for significant writing projects. Join us for presentations by two Heled Grant recipients: Grace Leahy and Ian McCormack. Grace Leahy thought she was going to Moscow for a research project. Then, she thought she was going to London for grad school. But in the end, she moved to Los Angeles to be a producer’s assistant with a couple weeks’ notice. Her Heled Grant piece is an attempt at processing all this. For his Heled grant, Ian McCormack travelled across state lines in pursuit of abandoned psychiatric centers. He explored them, day and night, in a sometimes frightening but always interesting road trip, and ended up writing some sometimes frightening but always interesting stories.
Grace Leahy graduated from Penn in the winter of 2020 with a double major in English and Cinema & Media Studies. The photo to the left was taken from her apartment on 42nd street, which she misses very much. She also misses the Writers House. And Nicola Gentili. Currently, Grace is based in Los Angeles, pursuing a career in film & television.
Ian McCormack graduated from Penn with a major in History and a minor in Creative Writing. He enjoys spooky stuff and adventuring in unlikely places. He is now based in Manchester, NH, working in board game publishing.
A conversation with fashion critic Rachel Seville Tashjian
A RealArts@Penn program
5:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis
sponsored by: Creative Ventures
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: on YouTube
Rachel Seville Tashjian (C'11) is the fashion critic at GQ and the creator of the newsletter Opulent Tips. She was formerly the deputy editor of Garage Magazine and a writer at Vanity Fair.