March 2015
Sunday, 3/1
Monday, 3/2
Fiction writer Katherine Heiny
A reading and conversation
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp: 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
Katherine Heiny's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic , Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, and many other publications. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and children. Single, Carefree, Mellow is her first book.
Mallory Ortberg
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
Mallory Ortberg is the cofounder of The Toast and the author of Texts From Jane Eyre.
Tuesday, 3/3
PENN AND PENCIL CLUB READING
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Event Canceled Due To Weather
A reading of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, written by members of the Penn and Pencil Club, a creative writing workshop for Penn staff from a variety of backgrounds and university departments.
Wednesday, 3/4
Sarah Dowling and Maxe Crandall
A poetry reading
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
Sarah Dowling is the author of DOWN, Birds & Bees, and Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for innovative poetry. Sarah's work is included in the anthologies I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and Emergency Index 2012, and has appeared in journals such as Encyclopedia, TCR, Line and Matrix. Sarah teaches at the University of Washington Bothell.
Maxe Crandall's chapbook Together Men Make Paradigms was published last summer by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The play premiered at Dixon Place and was shortlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award. A 2014 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow and a 2014 Poets House Fellow, Maxe teaches writing at Columbia University and is at work on a critical biography Gertrude Stein and Men.
Thursday, 3/5
Lunch with Matt Bai
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Dick Polman
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
Matt Bai is an author, journalist, screenwriter and Yankee fan. He's also one of the nation's leading voices on American politics. Matt is best known for stories that explore change in society — generational, technological, economic — and how that change is breaking down old institutions and transforming the politics of a new century. His second book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, was published in October 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf. Matt is the national political columnist at Yahoo News, which he joined in January 2014. Before that, he was chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, where he covered three presidential elections, and a columnist for both the magazine and the Times. Everything you ever wanted to know about Matt (including his brief but stellar acting career) is in his official bio.
Friday, 3/6
Saturday, 3/7
Sunday, 3/8
Monday, 3/9
Tuesday, 3/10
Wednesday, 3/11
Thursday, 3/12
Friday, 3/13
Saturday, 3/14
Sunday, 3/15
Monday, 3/16
A lunch talk with Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Dick Polman
A native of Kent, England, Barbara Laker came to the United States with her family when she was 12. In high school, as Watergate broke, Barbara knew she wanted to be a reporter. She graduated from the University of Missouri Journalism School in 1979. A reporter for more than 30 years, Barbara has worked for the Clearwater Sun, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Times-Herald and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, before joining the Philadelphia Daily News in 1993. She has written about everything from murder and corruption to AIDS and child abuse. At the Daily News, she has been a general assignment reporter, assistant city editor and investigative reporter. With Daily News colleague Wendy Ruderman, she won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for their series, "Tainted Justice," about a rogue narcotics squad in the Philadelphia Police Department.
Wendy Ruderman got her start in journalism in 1991 when she became editor of a weekly newspaper in South Jersey. She earned a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1997. Before joining the Philadelphia Daily News in 2007, she worked as a reporter at several media organizations, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Trenton Times, the Associated Press, and the Bergen Record. She covered New Jersey government and politics from 1998 through 2002, reporting on the administrations of former governors Christine T. Whitman and James E. McGreevey. From June 2012—June 2013, she was the New York Times' Police Bureau chief. She returned to the Philadelphia Daily News in August 2013 and is now assigned to the newspaper's City Hall Bureau.
Writers House Planning Committee Meeting
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
or (215) 746-POEM
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, 3/17
A poetry reading by C.K. Williams
Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Event Canceled
C. K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including All at Once: Prose Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Writers Writing Dying: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); Wait: PoemsCollected Poems (2007); The Singing (2003), which won the National Book Award; Repair (1999), winner of a Pulitzer Prize; The Vigil (1997); A Dream of Mind (1992); Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar (1983); With Ignorance (1997); I Am the Bitter Name (1992); and Lies (1969). Williams has also published five works of translation: Selected Poems of Francis Ponge (1994); Canvas, by Adam Zagajewski (with Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry, 1991); The Bacchae of Euripides (1990); The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa) (1983); and Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (with Gregory Dickerson, 1978). Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University and lives part of each year in Paris.
Wednesday, 3/18
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
7:30 in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of part 1 of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of part 1 of this event
watch: a video recording of part 2 of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of part 2 of this event
Our Speakeasy Open Mic Night is held once a month. We invite writers to share their work, or the work of others, in our Arts Cafe. Speakeasy welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, your award-winning essay, or your stand up comedy to share. You should expect outrageous (and free!) raffles for things you didn't know you needed, occasional costumes, and, of course, community members who love writing.
Thursday, 3/19
Leonard Cohen Song Symposium
Nine speakers, nine songs
A Creative Ventures Program
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
Al Filreis, Greg Djanikian, and Anthony DeCurtis join forces once again to bring us our fourth annual Song Symposium, this time on the works of Leonard Cohen. One by one, nine speakers will lead us through analyses of songs by Cohen, one of the most important and influential musical artists of the past fifty years.
Friday, 3/20
Saturday, 3/21
Sunday, 3/22
Monday, 3/23
Dorothy Allison
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian college on a National Merit Scholarship and studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research. An award-winning editor for early feminist and lesbian and gay journals such as Quest, Conditions, and Outlook, Allison is the author of the chapbook The Women Who Hate Me and the short story collection Trash, which won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing and includes the short story "Compassion, selected for both Best American Short Stories and Best New Stories from the South. Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize and an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing and became a best seller and award-winning movie; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Allison's second novel, Cavedweller, became a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. Adapted for the stage by Kate Moira Ryan, Cavedweller was directed by Michael Greif and featured music by Hedwig composer Stephen Trask. In 2003, Lisa Cholodenko directed a movie version featuring Kyra Sedgwick. Allison has been a McGee Professor and Writer in Residence at Davidson College, North Carolina; a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Emory University's Center for Humanistic Inquiry; Famosa in Residence at Macondo in San Antonio, Texas; and Writer in Residence at Columbia College in Chicago. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the board of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She lives in Northern California.
Tuesday, 3/24
Dorothy Allison
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian college on a National Merit Scholarship and studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research. An award-winning editor for early feminist and lesbian and gay journals such as Quest, Conditions, and Outlook, Allison is the author of the chapbook The Women Who Hate Me and the short story collection Trash, which won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing and includes the short story "Compassion," selected for both Best American Short Stories and Best New Stories from the South. Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize and an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing and became a best seller and award-winning movie; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Allison's second novel, Cavedweller, became a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. Adapted for the stage by Kate Moira Ryan, Cavedweller was directed by Michael Greif and featured music by Hedwig composer Stephen Trask. In 2003, Lisa Cholodenko directed a movie version featuring Kyra Sedgwick. Allison has been a McGee Professor and Writer in Residence at Davidson College, North Carolina; a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Emory University's Center for Humanistic Inquiry; Famosa in Residence at Macondo in San Antonio, Texas; and Writer in Residence at Columbia College in Chicago. Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the board of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She lives in Northern California.
Wednesday, 3/25
Daedalus Quartet performance
A Creative Ventures Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
The Daedalus Quartet has been Quartet–in–Residence at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. Praised by The New Yorker as "a fresh and vital young participant in what is a golden age of American string quartets," the Quartet has established itself as a leader among the new generation of string ensembles. In the thirteen years of its existence the Daedalus Quartet has received plaudits from critics and listeners alike for the security, technical finish, interpretive unity, and sheer gusto of its performances. Since its founding the Daedalus Quartet has performed in many of the world's leading musical venues and has won plaudits for its adventurous exploration of contemporary music, most notably the compositions of Elliott Carter, George Perle, György Kurtág and György Ligeti. The Quartet's most recent recording, for Bridge Records, features the string quartets of George Perle, and has been described as "disc with some unforgettable contemporary chamber music" (Classical Lost and Found), and the Strad Magazine praised the quartet's "exemplary intonation and balance." The award-winning members of the Daedalus Quartet hold degrees from the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute, Cleveland Institute, and Harvard University. Find out more: here.
Leslie Jamison: a reading & conversation
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
Leslie Jamison is a novelist and essayist who has also worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. Her collection of essays The Empathy Exams won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Her novel The Gin Closet was published by Free Press in 2010. Her work has appeared or will appear in Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale about addiction narratives.
Thursday, 3/26
REALARTS@PENN PRESENTS EMILY SPIVACK
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Everyone has a memoir in miniature in at least one piece of clothing. In her New York Times best selling book, Worn Stories, Emily Spivack has collected over sixty of these clothing-inspired narratives from cultural figures and talented storytellers. First-person accounts range from the everyday to the extraordinary, such as artist Marina Abramovic on the boots she wore to walk the Great Wall of China; musician Rosanne Cash on the purple shirt that belonged to her father; and fashion designer Cynthia Rowley on the Girl Scout sash that informed her business acumen. By turns funny, tragic, poignant, and celebratory, Worn Stories offers a revealing look at the clothes that protect us, serve as a uniform, assert our identity, or bring back the past — clothes that are encoded with the stories of our lives. In her Writers House talk, Spivack will share experiences and anecdotes that led her to found the Worn Stories project and others connected to fashion, contemporary culture, and history.
Emily Spivack is an artist, writer, and editor whose work draws from contemporary culture, fashion, and history. Emily launched Worn Stories (http://wornstories.com), a collection of stories she edits from cultural figures and talented storytellers about clothing and memory, in 2010. A New York Times best selling book, Worn Stories was published by Princeton Architectural Press in Fall 2014. Emily has spent six years culling stories about clothing from eBay posts for a website she curates, Sentimental Value (http://sentimental-value.com), and she has exhibited the Internet found-art project in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Portland. Emily is the creator and writer of the Smithsonian's only blog about the history of clothing, drawing from the institution's vast collection and beyond, called Threaded (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/category/threaded/). Emily and her work have been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post among other publications.
Friday, 3/27
Saturday, 3/28
Sunday, 3/29
Monday, 3/30
J.C. Cloutier with Paul Levitz and Rob Berry
a Wexler Studio conversation
listen: to an audio recording of this program
J.C. Clouter is joined by Rob Berry and former DC Comics President Paul Levitz in the Wexler Studio as the trio discuss Paul's time with DC Comics; the importance of the "event" comic and the death(s) of Superman; the appearance of DC heroes in various media; and the past, present, and future of comics in general.
LIVE at the Writers House
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the people of Kelly Writers House and WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc.
E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He is the author of numerous short stories and three young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin; Quantum Coin; and The Silence of Six, a thriller about teenage hackers, surveillance, and government conspiracies. His next novel, Against All Silence, is scheduled to appear next year from Adaptive Books. E.C. currently lives with his wife, son, and two doofy cats in Philadelphia. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at http://ecmyers.net and on Twitter: @ecmyers.
Eric Smith is an author, blogger, and full-time book geek living in Philadelphia. His books include The Geek's Guide to Dating (Quirk, 2013) and the YA novel Inked (Bloomsbury Spark, 2015). He's a regular contributor to sites like Bookriot, The Huffington Post, and is the co-founder of the hyperlocal geek blog Geekadelphia. His ramblings have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Weekly, Buzzfeed, and Boing Boing, with essays in The Apiary and Bygone Bureau. You can follow him on Twitter at @ericsmithrocks.
Katherine Locke lives and writes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she's ruled by her feline overlords and her addiction to chai lattes. Her dayjobs always vary, but in the past she's worked in nuclear weapons abolition activism, lead poisoning prevention and education, and food safety programs at a mushroom farm. When she's not writing, she's reading, and when she's not reading, she's tweeting about reading and writing. She secretly believes most books are fairytales in disguise. Her debut novel, Second Position, arrives in April 2015 from Carina Press. You can find her online at @bibliogato on Twitter and KatherineLockeBooks.com.
Lauren Saft holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor's degree from Tufts University. She's worked in publishing, TV, education, child care, retail, journalism, and food service, all the while closely studying the habits and compulsions of teenage girls. She currently works as a TV producer in Philadelphia where she lives with her cat, Desi, and boyfriend, Steve — both of whom fuel and inspire her creativity equally. Her work has been published in Five Quarterly, Switchback, and Clubplanet.com. One time, she met the Olsen twins. Those Girls is her debut novel.
I. W. Gregorio (C '98) is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, None of the Above (Balzer & Bray / HarperCollins, April 7, 2015). She is a founding member of WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS and serves as its VP of Development. A recovering ice hockey player, she lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. Find her online at www.iwgregorio.com, and on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram at @iwgregorio.
Tiffany Schmidt is the author of Send Me a Sign and Bright Before Sunrise. Her Once Upon a Crime Family series will begin with Hold Me Like a Breath in May 2015. A former sixth grade teacher, Tiffany loves to get back in the classroom for author visits and works with students in elementary through high school. When not teaching, writing, or reading, she's usually chasing her impish twins (The Schmidtlets) or mischievous puggles (Biscotti & Bruschi) around their house in Bucks County. She's a firm believer in Happily Ever Afters, accidental hijinks, and writing kissing scenes first—inspired, no doubt, by her very saintly husband. You can find out more about Tiffany at TiffanySchmidt.com.
Birdie Busch graduated from University of Miami with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. Since then she has built her life around songwriting, releasing albums, and touring the United States. She recently just finished a year teaching songwriting to children at Music and Mentorship, a West Philly program that runs out of the Intercultural Family Services. She also is a huge supporter and past volunteer of Musicians on Call, a program run by WXPN that provides music bedside to patients in local hospitals. She feels songs are the connectors of humanity and likes working within that form to reckon and reconcile hers and others emotions fully and distill them into gifts for the world.
Tuesday, 3/31
New trends in mystery, romance & GLBT publishing
A conversation with Neil Plakcy
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM
co-sponsored by: LGBTQ Center
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Join us for a conversation about trends in genre writing, editing, and e-publishing, led by Neil Plakcy whose own work has been published across many platforms and by large and small presses.
Neil Plakcy studied creative writing at Penn with professors including Philip Roth and Carlos Fuentes, then went on to get an MFA in fiction. He is a hybrid author – his twenty-plus novels have been published by large and small presses, and he's successfully self-published a best-selling mystery series. He also compiles anthologies, edits manuscripts, and teaches writing at Broward College in Florida. He has spoken at many national conferences about his own work as well as the e-publishing industry.
WRITING ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH
Junior Fellows Program
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
As this years recipient of the Kelly Writers House Junior Fellows Prize, Hannah White has undertaken a project to make the Writers House a space where we can talk about issues of mental health and illness from a writers perspective. In traditional "7-Up" style, seven different people (students, professors, community members) will each select and then write/speak about an important novel, short story, or poem dealing with issues of mental (in)stability. "Important" can mean anything here: personally important, culturally important, historically important, obscure but interesting, challenging to the traditional ideas of illness and wellness, etc. We hope that a wide range of perspectives and literary works will bring together seemingly disparate subsets of the wider community—and will also reveal plenty of interesting ideas about health, culture, relationships, and what is "normal."
- Ryan Cambe
- Beth Kephart
- Devon O'Connor
- Nick Moncy
- Julie Mullany
- Emily Sheera Cutler
- Claudia Consolati
- Lance Wahlert
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
One Thing Stolen by Beth Kephart
"Round Here" by Counting Crows
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
"Barbie Doll" by Marge Piercy
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier
Narratives of suicide