March 2024
Friday, 3/1
Saturday, 3/2
Sunday, 3/3
Monday, 3/4
Tuesday, 3/5
Wednesday, 3/6
Thursday, 3/7
Friday, 3/8
Saturday, 3/9
Sunday, 3/10
Monday, 3/11
Journalists Maureen Dowd and Ashley Parker
in conversation with Paul Hendrickson
Povich Journalism Program
6:00 PM in person at the Writers House
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became a New York Times Op-Ed columnist in 1995. In August 2014, she also became a writer for The Times Magazine. Born in Washington, Ms. Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. In 1983, she joined The New York Times as a metropolitan correspondent and then moved to the Washington bureau in 1986 to cover politics. Ms. Dowd has covered nine presidential campaigns, served as The Times’s White House correspondent, and written “On Washington,” a column for The Times Magazine. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, G. P. Putnam published her first book, Bushworld, which covered the presidency and personality of George W. Bush. After Bushworld quickly climbed the best-seller list, Ms. Dowd switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another best seller, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, released in 2005. Her third book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, was released in 2016. In addition to The New York Times, Ms. Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated and others. Ms. Dowd received her undergraduate degree from Catholic University, and, in 2023, her Master's Degree in English Literature from Columbia University.
ASHLEY PARKER (C’05) is senior national political correspondent for the Washington Post, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Most recently, she served as the White House bureau chief, covering the first two years of the Biden presidency, as well as the entirety of the Trump presidency. In 2022, she was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for their coverage of the causes, costs and aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2018, for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She was also part of the Washington Post team that won the George Polk Award for national reporting in 2022, for the project “The Attack,” which chronicled the January 6 attack. In 2019, Parker served as one of the moderators for the Democratic presidential primary debate in Atlanta, hosted by the Washington Post and MSNBC. Parker joined the Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns, and Congress, among other things. She is an NBC/MSNBC senior political analyst, and has also written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Glamour, and The Washingtonian, as well as other publications. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, with a degree in both English (creative writing) and Communications, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, New York Times political correspondent Mike Bender, and their three daughters.
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of it once--for his 2003 Sons of Mississippi. His The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. His 2011 Hemingway's Boat was both a New York Times and London best-seller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. In 2009 he was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, 3/12
A Reading by Harmony Holiday
Creative Writing Program Event
6:00 PM in person at the Writers House
hosted by: Laynie Browne
rsvp: register here to attend in person
watch: a recording of this program here.
Join us for a reading by writer, dancer, archivist and filmmaker Harmony Holiday, whose recent books of poetry include Hollywood Forever and Maaafa.
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220arts. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and an exhibition on backstage culture for The Kitchen in New York, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
Wednesday, 3/13
A Conversation with Rebecca Traister
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Dick Polman
watch: a recording of this program here.
Rebecca Traister is writer-at-large at New York Magazine, where she covers politics, media, and culture from a feminist perspective. Traister has written for The New Republic, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, the Washington Post, Elle, and other publications. Winner of a 2018 National Magazine Award and 2016 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, Traister is the author of Good and Mad, a New York Times best seller and among the Washington Post and People’s ten best books of 2018, as well as All the Single Ladies, a New York Times best seller and Notable Book of 2016.
Novelist Alexander Chee
Friedman Fiction Program
5:00 PM: reception
6:00 PM: reading and conversation
rsvp: register here to attend in person
watch: a recording of this porgram here.
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, and was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. Chee is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig Hou se, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. Chee is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.
Thursday, 3/14
Friday, 3/15
Saturday, 3/16
Sunday, 3/17
Monday, 3/18
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:00 PM in person
rsvp: 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, 3/19
Ariel Djanikian, Dan Finkel, Sanaë Lemoine, and Alicia Oltuski
A reading by former students of Max Apple
Beltran Family Program
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
watch: a recording of this program here.
Creative Writing faculty member Max Apple, winner of the 2023–2024 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring, has invited four of his former students – Ariel Djanikian, Dan Finkel, Sanaë Lemoine, and Alicia Oltuski — to share their writing.
Ariel Djanikian is the author of two novels, The Prospectors (William Morrow, 2023), selected for the Barnes & Noble Book Club, and The Office of Mercy (Viking, 2013). She attended the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA program at the University of Michigan. She is the previous recipient of a Fulbright grant, Meijer Fellowship, Cowden Award, and Hopwood Award, and her writing has appeared in Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The Millions, and The Rumpus. Born in Philadelphia, she currently lives near Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.
Daniel Finkel is a writer from Philadelphia. He graduated from Penn in 2020 with a degree in English and is working on his first novel, a comedy about union-busting.
Sanaë Lemoine is a novelist and cookbook author. She is the author of THE MARGOT AFFAIR, a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, and a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Born to a Japanese mother and French father, Sanaë was raised in France and Australia, and now lives in Brooklyn.
Alicia Oltuski’s work has appeared on TheNewYorker.com, Esquire.com, in Tin House magazine, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Barcelona Review, and in book form as Precious Objects. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has included writing, lecturing, project management, translation from German, and amateur dog walking.
Wednesday, 3/20
Love & Rockets: A Conversation with Jaime Hernandez
12:00 PM in person
hosted by: Natalia Ramos Bellido (C'26)
co-sponsored by: The Latinx Working Group, AmLit, ComicsLab, The Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and Creative Ventures
rsvp: register here to attend in person
watch: a recording of this program here.
Jaime Hernandez, co-author of the legendary comic book series Love & Rockets, will be joining Natalia Ramos Bellido for a conversation on the craft of comics and the series' legacy on the medium.
Jaime Hernandez was one of six siblings born and raised in Oxnard, California. His mother passed down a love of comics, which for Jaime became a passion rivaled only by his interest in the burgeoning punk rock scene of 1970s Southern California. Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime co-created the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to both write and draw to this day. Jaime’s work began as a perfect (if unlikely) synthesis of the anarchistic, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the punk scene and an elegant cartooning style that recalled masters such as Charles M. Schulz and Alex Toth. Love and Rockets has evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning five decades and countless high-water marks in the medium’s history. In 2016, Hernandez won the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his graphic novel, The Love Bunglers. In 2017, he (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and, in 2018, he released his first children’s book, the Aesop Book Prize-winning The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America. He is a lifelong Angeleno.
SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT
Poetry, prose, anything goes
7:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You’ll have three minutes at the podium to perform. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, your award-winning essay, or your flash fiction to share.
Thursday, 3/21
Penn Appetit Food Summit
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
watch: a recording of this program here.
Presented by Penn Appetit, the annual Penn Appetit Food Summit covers a wide range of topics related to the food industry, including this semester’s magazine theme, “Close to Home,” which explores how food can make people feel closer to their roots.
Friday, 3/22
Saturday, 3/23
Sunday, 3/24
Monday, 3/25
LIVE at the Writers House
a monthly radio show produced in collaboration with WXPN
6:30 PM in person
LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration of the people of the Kelly Writers House and of WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, the Writers House records a one-hour show of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art for broadcast by WXPN. LIVE at the Writers House is edited by Zach Carduner and produced by Alli Katz. The show is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc.
Tuesday, 3/26
Pixel to Print
Brodsky Gallery Opening and risograph workshop
5:30 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
The “Pixel to Print” art exhibit will feature the works of current and past students of Kayla Romberger, including those in her Pixel to Print class in the School of Design. Join us at 5:30 for a risograph poster making workshop and stay to tour the show!
Wednesday, 3/27
Poetry and Global Justice
A reading and conversation with Khaled Mattawa
presented in collaboration with the Wolf Humanities Forum
5:30 PM in person
hosted by: Huda Fakhreddine
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Khaled Mattawa’s latest collection Fugitive Atlas is a lyrical examination of global injustice and upheaval, specifically the ongoing migrant and refugee crisis in Europe. Following a reading, Mattawa will speak with Wolf Humanities Center’s 2023–24 topic director Huda Fakhreddine about the time he spent aboard a migrant ship between Italy and Libya and his deep commitment to literary activism.
Born and raised in Benghazi, Libya, poet Khaled Mattawa relocated to the United States as a teenager in 1979. Mattawa’s poetry frequently explores the intersection of culture, narrative, and memory. In a 2007 Blackbird interview, addressing the connection between his emigration from Libya to the United States and his poetry, Mattawa observed, “I think memory was very important to my work as a structure, that the tone of remembrance, or the position of remembering, is very important, was a way of speaking when I was in between deciding to stay and not stay, and I had decided to stay.” Most recently, Mattawa is the author of the collection Fugitive Atlas (2020). With extraordinary formal virtuosity and global scope, these poems turn not to lament for those regions charted as theaters of exploitation and environmental malpractice but to a poignant amplification of the lives, dreams, and families that exist within them. In these exquisite pages, Mattawa asks how we are expected to endure our times, how we inherit the journeys of our ancestors, and how we let loose those we love into an unpredictable world. Mattawa has published numerous other collections of poetry, including Ismailia Eclipse (1995), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), Amorisco (2008), Tocqueville (2010), and Mare Nostrum (2019). He has translated volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including Adonis’s Concerto al-Quds (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (2017) and Shepherd of Solitude: Selected Poems of Amjad Nasser (2009). He coedited the anthologies Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Arab American Fiction (2004) and Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999). Mattawa’s own work has been widely anthologized as well. He is the recipient of several Pushcart Prizes and the PEN Award for Literary Translation, in addition to a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a MacArthur fellowship. He earned a BA in political science and economics from the University of Tennessee, an MA and an MFA from Indiana University, and a PhD from Duke University. The editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, he has taught at Indiana University; California State University, Northridge; and, currently, the University of Michigan.