March 2023
Wednesday, 3/1
SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT
Poetry, prose, anything goes
7:30 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
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, your award-winning essay, or your flash fiction to share.
Thursday, 3/2
Friday, 3/3
Saturday, 3/4
Sunday, 3/5
Monday, 3/6
Tuesday, 3/7
Wednesday, 3/8
Thursday, 3/9
Friday, 3/10
Saturday, 3/11
Sunday, 3/12
Monday, 3/13
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
The Kelly Writers House is run collectively by members of its community, especially students. The Writers House Planning Committee — also known as "the Hub" — meets monthly to discuss Writers House projects and programs. Join us at this first meeting of the year to find out about some of the things we will work on this year, including our annual marathon reading, and to find out how you can get involved with community-led events and projects.
Tuesday, 3/14
Heled Travel Grant Presentations: Drew Basile and Sof Sears
12:00 PM (ET) in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Heled Travel and Research Grants enable students to travel and conduct research for significant writing projects. Join us for presentations by this year’s winners: Sof Sears (C’23), who studied “death culture” in Paris, and Drew Basile (C’23), who followed the path of Goethe’s famous 1786 tour through Italy.
Wednesday, 3/15
Thursday, 3/16
Rob Sheffield: a conversation and karaoke party
5:00 PM (ET) in person and on YouTube
hosted by: Anthony Decurtis
Presented by: RealArts@Penn
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Rob Sheffield is a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where he has been covering music and pop culture since 1997. (His first issue had Tori Spelling on the cover.) He is the New York Times best-selling author of five books, including Love Is A Mix Tape, Talking To Girls About Duran Duran, Turn Around Bright Eyes, On Bowie, and Dreaming The Beatles.
A karaoke party will follow!
Friday, 3/17
Saturday, 3/18
Sunday, 3/19
Monday, 3/20
LIVE at the Writers House
WXPN radio show
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
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" is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc and is produced by Alli Katz.
Tuesday, 3/21
POEMTALK ON ALDON NIELSEN
Featuring Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and Tyrone Williams
12:00 PM in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Hosted by: Al Filreis
watch: here
PoemTalk features lively discussions of poetry in the PennSound archive. In this special taping of PoemTalk in front of an audience, PoemTalk host and producer Al Filreis will lead a discussion with Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and Tyrone Williams about poems in Neilsen’s book Tray.
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams
A poetry reading in celebration of Aldon Nielsen
6:00 PM in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Hosted by: Al Filreis
watch: here
A.L. Nielsen, the first recipient of the Larry Neal Award for poetry, is the author of the recent volumes Back Pages: Selected Poems, Sufferhead, Tray and Spider Cone. With Grammy-nominated Ethelbert Miller, he published the hybrid memoir/interview book MemeWars. Two of his spoken word collections are streaming on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and others: Sometimes I Wonder Can a Cigar Box Hold My Blues and More Blues, Rage and Hollers. Nielsen has taught at Howard University, San Jose State, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Penn State and Central China Normal University. His most recent work of criticism is The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka.
William J. Harris is an emeritus professor of American Literature, African American Literature, creative writing and Jazz Studies. He has taught at the University of Kansas, Penn State University and Cornell, and other institutions. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Among his books are The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (criticism), Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment (poetry), In My Dark Way (poetry) and Crooners (poetry). He is the editor of The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The African American Review, Callaloo, Art Forum and The Boston Review. This month (February) Poetry Magazine is featuring a special 44 page folio devoted to Harris’s work and in March the critic Adam Bradley will discuss Harris in an article about Black Poetry in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/
Wednesday, 3/22
Speculative Poetics for Video Games and AI
A book launch for Elden Poem and the The Institute for Other Intelligences
6:00 PM (ET) in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
In this joint book launch, Daniel Snelson and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian present readings and performances from Elden Poem (Hysterically Real, 2022) and The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022). In The Institute for Other Intelligences, Hakopian presents the transcript of a fictive symposium on critical AI, convened at a not-yet-extant school for machine intelligences, artificial killjoys, and sundry bots. Across both works, the authors develop a poetics for inscribing speculative missives within the media platforms and network cultures of the present.
Hosted by Al Filreis, the event will feature live gameplay, an illustrated lecture-performance, video excerpts, and a poetry reading, with a Q&A on games, AI, and poetics to follow.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design. In 2021, she was a visiting Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” with Meldia Yesayan. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of the collective, Research Service. She is a Contributing Editor for Art Papers, and her writing and commentary have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Journal, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Meghan Markle's Archetypes. Performances and projects have been presented at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Drawing Center (NY), Judson Memorial Church (NY), and in the New Museum (NY) Voice Registers Series. See also: www.mashinkafirunts.com
Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA. His online editorial work can be found on PennSound, Eclipse, UbuWeb, Jacket2, and the EPC. His books include Full Bleed: A Mourning Letter for the Printed Page (Sync, 2019), Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984-2000 (Monoskop, 2018), Radios (Make Now, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2014), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). With Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Avi Alpert, he performs as one-third of the academic performance group Research Service. See also: dss-edit.com
About Elden Poem:
Elden Poem was written using the in-game messaging system
deployed in FromSoftware’s hit game, Elden Ring. This dark
fantasy social media network is comprised of runic stones placed on the ground, composed
with a limited set of textual options using the “Tarnished’s Wizened Finger” relic.
The messages are etched in stone via pre-determined phrasal fragments that may be
accompanied by ghostly traces left by the player character called “gestures.” In this
work, Snelson plays a wandering bard – misusing the system to produce the most unlikely
of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game’s landscape. The book is a documentation
of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. Anyone can leave a
message in the game’s environment. Online players discover these messages left by others
throughout the Lands Between. Messages are commonly used to help, hinder, encourage,
troll, amuse, and/or distract players. Like emoji keyboards and the OuLiPo,
Elden Ring’s messaging system presents constraint-based
literary rules for collective invention. In a past life, these poems inhabited the gaming
environment itself. Subject to the ongoing erasure of message limits and time-based
access, they’ve begun to dissolve, rendered as ephemeral as the hours one spends at play.
Here, for a moment, “spellsword” meets “spells word,” and the materialization of play
inscribes a poetics of digital messaging. Published by Hysterically Real:
http://www.hystericallyreal.com
About The Institute for Other Intelligences:
The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022)
brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine
intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a
transcript from one of these conferences, in which a community of “AI agents” gather at a
school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions
encoded in their training data. The resulting manuscript, published on the occasion of
the Institute’s millennial anniversary, revisits sociotechnical systems from its founding
in the 21st century. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the
trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations
of intelligent machines toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges
to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might
reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of
another way forward. Edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram for X Topics,
The Institute for Other Intelligences includes an
introduction by Vikram, design by Becca Lofchie, and diagrammatic illustrations by
Fernando Diaz, a scientist whose work focuses on the quantitative evaluation and algorithmic
design of information access systems.
Thursday, 3/23
From Borderlands to Bathhouses
A live reading by Jesús I. Valles and Ricardo Bracho
12:00 PM in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Co-sponsored by: La Casa Latina, the Africana Center, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, Mellon Just Futures Dispossession in the Americas Grant, the Department of English, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography
watch: here
Note: masks are required for this event
In this live reading and conversation, playwrights Jesús I. Valles (they/them) and Ricardo A. Bracho will engage the U.S./Mexico borderlands and bathhouses as insurgent geographies of queer Latinx life. Putting excerpts from two of Jesús’s plays in conversation with one another, the playwrights consider their personal experiences as queer artist-scholars whose work reflects on colonial hauntings, familial memories, and erotic desires. Their reading and conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. Lunch will be provided at the conclusion of the conversation.
Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is a 2021 CantoMundo fellowship recipient at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2019 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers’ Poetry Workshop, and a poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week. Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator, and the runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR’s Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets’ LatiNext Anthology, and the Best New Poets 2020 anthology. As an actor, they are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama (2018), and Outstanding Original Script (2018) and they were nominated for the Mark David Cohen New Play Award for their play, (Un)Documents. They most recently starred as Penny Marshall in Victor I. Cazares’ Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall: Death Rituals for Penny Marshall for New York Theatre Workshop. Jesús was OUTSider festival’s first OUTsider-in-residence and is currently an MFA playwriting student at Brown University. Their plays include (Un)documents, bala.fruta, a river, its mouths, and bathhouse.pptx.
Ricardo A. Bracho is a writer, editor and teacher who has worked in community and university, theater and video/film, politics and aesthetics for the past twenty-nine years. His other academic appointments include Visiting Multicultural Faculty at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago and Artist-Scholar in Residence at the Center for Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His award-winning plays, which include The Sweetest Hangover, Sissy, Puto and Mexican Psychotic have been produced in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, as well as workshopped and staged nationwide. His focus in community has been on social justice, public health, and the arts with queer and trans youth of color, Latina/o/x high risk populations, queer men of color, and incarcerated men. He has been a participant in the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group residency program as well as with Mabou Mines. He is currently compiling his selected plays for publication as well as completing a manuscript of poems, The Salt of Him.
Voices of the Sophomore Class
6:30 PM (ET) in person and on YouTube
watch: here
The Sophomore Class Board is hosting an open-mic night at the Writers House to showcase the talented and diverse voices of the Class of 2025!
Come to KWH to hear your classmates perform and eat some free food. Interested in being considered as a performer? (poetry, music, comedy, fiction, your choice). Fill out this form to submit a piece (the Sophomore Class Board will select up to 10 speakers)
Friday, 3/24
Saturday, 3/25
Sunday, 3/26
Monday, 3/27
A reading by Jason Reynolds
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Watch: on YouTube
Born in Washington, DC and raised in Oxon Hill, Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen books. At nine years old, he drew inspiration from rap music, and began writing poetry. He now writes primarily for elementary and middle school aged kids, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, Stuntboy, in the Meantime, and Long Way Down, which was named a Newbery Honor Book, and best young adult work by the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards. His book, Ghost, was a National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature. He also wrote a Marvel Comic, Miles Morales: Spider-Man, in 2017, just three years after his first novel, When I Was the Greatest, won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Tuesday, 3/28
A conversation with Jason Reynolds
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Watch: on YouTube
Born in Washington, DC and raised in Oxon Hill, Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen books. At nine years old, he drew inspiration from rap music, and began writing poetry. He now writes primarily for elementary and middle school aged kids, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, Stuntboy, in the Meantime, and Long Way Down, which was named a Newbery Honor Book, and best young adult work by the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards. His book, Ghost, was a National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature. He also wrote a Marvel Comic, Miles Morales: Spider-Man, in 2017, just three years after his first novel, When I Was the Greatest, won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Wednesday, 3/29
YA Authors in Conversation about Craft
Chloe Gong, Candice Iloh, and Anica Mrose Rissi, with Nova Ren Suma
Lucy F. Demarco Program
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Ever considered writing a YA novel? Join three celebrated special guest YA authors for a panel event and conversation on writing craft specific to a young adult audience. #1 New York Times bestselling author and Penn alumna Chloe Gong, National Book Award finalist Candice Iloh, andaward-winning author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens Anica Mrose Rissi, hosted by Penn faculty Nova Ren Suma. Open to the Penn community and to the public. Book signing to follow.
Chloe Gong is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights and its sequel Our Violent Ends. She is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she double-majored in English and International Relations. Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, Chloe is now located in New York pretending to be a real adult.
Candice Iloh is a first generation Nigerian-American writer, dancer, and author of the 2020 National Book Award finalist and 2021 Printz Honoree, Every Body Looking. They have performed their work arounds the country, most notably at Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City; the Women in Poetry & Hip Hop celebration at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore; and as part of the Africa In Motion performing arts series at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Competitively, Iloh has advanced to the final rounds of the Graffiti DC Slam, Beltway Poetry Slam, and 11th Hour Poetry Slam. Candice is currently writing their third novel, Salt the Water, while touring their second, Break This House (Out May 24, 2022). They live and work in Philadelphia with their cats Maxinne and Charlie.
Anica Mrose Rissi is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens, including the Anna, Banana chapter book series; the middle grade collection Hide and Don’t Seek: And Other Very Scary Stories; the picture book Love, Sophia on the Moon; and the young adult novel Nobody Knows But You. Her next book, Wishing Season, a middle grade novel set on the Maine island where she grew up, comes out in June 2023 and is available for preorder now. Anica’s essays have been published by The Writer and the New York Times, and she plays fiddle in and writes lyrics for the band Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves. She currently lives near Princeton, New Jersey , with her very good dog, Sweet Potato.
Nova Ren Suma is the author of A Room Away from the Wolves and the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us, both finalists for an Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel. She also wrote the novels Imaginary Girls, 17 & Gone, and Dani Noir and is co-editor of the story & writing craft anthology FORESHADOW: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading & Writing YA. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has taught creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Philadelphia.
Thursday, 3/30
A Conversation with Literary Agent Eric Smith
Applebaum Publisher and Editors Series
Hosted by Julia Bloch
12:00 PM (ET) in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
Eric Smith is a literary agent, young adult author, and editor from Elizabeth, New Jersey. As an agent with P.S. Literary, he’s worked on New York Times bestselling and award-winning books. His recent novels include the YALSA Best Books for Young Readers selection Don’t Read the Comments (Inkyard Press, 2020), You Can Go Your Own Way (Inkyard Press, 2021), and the anthology Battle of the Bands (Candlewick, 2021), co-edited with award-winning author Lauren Gibaldi. His latest book, Jagged Little Pill: The Novel, was written with Alanis Morissette, Academy award-winner Diablo Cody, and Glen Ballard, and is an adaptation of the Grammy and Tony award winning musical. Eric's other books include the IndieBound bestseller The Geek’s Guide to Dating (Quirk), the Inked duology (Bloomsbury), and The Girl and the Grove (Flux). His writing has sold into nine languages. A lifelong lover of writing and books, he holds degrees from from Kean University and Arcadia University, where he currently mentors MFA students. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son, and enjoys video games, pop punk, and crying over every movie.
Unsovereign Elements: Geological Poetics in Contemporary Art from the Caribbean and its Diaspora
Brodsky Gallery exhibition opening, curatorial tour, and artists in conversation
6:00 PM (ET) in person and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Featuring artists from the Caribbean and its diaspora, this exhibition, curated by Cecilia González Godino, examines the ambiguous role of geological elements in the (re)production of the archipelago — certainly exhausted by modernity as discursive instruments, yet always retaining a poetic potential that far exceeds their materiality.
Come meet the artists in conversation, followed by a curatorial tour and reception.
This Brodsky Gallery exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Student Initiatives Fund at the Kelly Writers House, the Brodsky Gallery Fund, the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH), the GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS).