March 2026
Sunday, 3/1/2026
Monday, 3/2/2026
A Meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee
5:30 PM 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, 3/3/2026
Wednesday, 3/4/2026
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 and performances. A sign-up sheet will be available when you arrive and 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 – or just come to celebrate your classmates, colleagues, and fellow writers.
Thursday, 3/5/2026
Friday, 3/6/2026
Saturday, 3/7/2026
Sunday, 3/8/2026
Monday, 3/9/2026
Tuesday, 3/10/2026
Wednesday, 3/11/2026
Thursday, 3/12/2026
Friday, 3/13/2026
Saturday, 3/14/2026
Sunday, 3/15/2026
Monday, 3/16/2026
Tuesday, 3/17/2026
A Celebration of the Life and Work of Alice Notley
With readings and reflections by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Julia Bloch, erica kaufman, Michelle Lu, Pattie McCarthy, and Shoshana Olidort
5:30 PM in person
hosted by: Laynie Browne
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Please join us for a special evening honoring the life and work of poet Alice Notley (November 8, 1945 - May 20 2025). In her early career, Notley was primarily associated with the second generation of New York School poets, though she never limited her writing to any one specific school or genre. In subsequent decades Notley continued writing poetry that defied conventions. She describes her feminist epic poem, The Descent of Alette, as follows: “an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces, against the fragmented forms of modern poetry, against the way a poem was supposed to look according to both past and contemporary practice.” Notley's visionary, disobedient verse is most famously connected to an uncanny ability to converse with the dead, the disembodied, and the otherwordly. Please join us for remembrances and readings to celebrate one of the most brilliant and prolific poets of our time.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic and collagist, Professor Emerita at Temple University, whose notable long poem Drafts, published by Coffee House Press (2025), was conceptualized as an excessive and wide-ranging work of socio-poesis within an ethical aesthetics. Recent, relevant critical books include A Long Essay on the Long Poem (2023) with an essay on Alice Notley's work; and Daykeeping (Selva Oscura, 2023), a fierce poetic response to events of 2020. In her career as a poet-critic, she has written extensively on gender and poetry. DuPlessis' affiliations with Objectivist poetry and poetics includes her pioneering edition of The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Among her awards are a residency at Bellagio, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a year at the National Humanities Center. Poetry by DuPlessis in translation includes books in French, Italian and Russian, and individual works and chapbooks appearing in German, Portuguese and Spanish. Her website is www.rachelblauduplessis.net; all Drafts are available recorded at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/DuPlessis.php.
Edmund Berrigan is the author of More Gone (City Lights, 2019), a book of poetry. With Anselm Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Nick Sturm, he co-edited Get the Money (Collected Prose 1961-1983) by Ted Berrigan(City Lights, 2022). He also edited the Collected Poems of Steve Carey, forthcoming in 2026 from Subpress.
Julia Bloch is the author most recently of a book of poems, The Sacramento of Desire, and of criticism, Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem. A Pew Fellow in the Arts, she directs the Creative Writing Program at Penn and lives in Philadelphia.
writer, and teacher, erica kaufman, is the author of three books of poetry: Post Classic, Instant Classic (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). she is co-editor of No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. recent poems can be found in Ursula and e-flux. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in: The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; Reading Experimental Writing; and The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. she is based at Bard College where she is the director of both the Institute for Writing & Thinking and the Language and Thinking Program, and teaches in the Written Arts Program.
Michelle Lu is a third-year studying English, with minors in Chemistry and Creative Writing. She first encountered the work of Alice Notley as a student in the Kelly Writers House Fellows Seminar last spring, where Notley’s vision of the self as ever-becoming and radically receptive, rooted in interior truth and care, has reshaped Michelle's understanding of poetic possibility. On campus, Michelle serves as Managing Editor for The Penn Review, editor of The Woodlands, and President of WriteMinds, a creative writing initiative for older adults in Philadelphia.
Pattie McCarthy is the author of eight books of poetry, including Wifthing (2021) and intertidal (forthcoming 2026), both from Apogee Press, and a dozen chapbooks, most recently extraordinary tides (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts, she is a non-tenure track professor at Temple University in Philadelphia where she is the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.
Shoshana Olidort is a critic, writer, and translator. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Lit Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Poetry Northwest, Public Book, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University and has taught at Amherst College.
Wednesday, 3/18/2026
YA Authors in Conversation About Craft
Elizabeth Lim, Rowana Miller, and Alexandra Villasante with Nova Ren Suma
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Elizabeth Lim is the #1 New York Times and international bestselling author of A Forgery of Fate, Six Crimson Cranes, and Spin the Dawn. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was raised on a hearty diet of fairy tales, myths, and songs. Before becoming an author, Elizabeth was a professional film and video game composer, and she still tends to come up with her best book ideas when writing near a piano. She lives in New York with her husband and daughters.
Rowana Miller (C'22) writes about riddles, goblins, secrets, strange girls, and mischief. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a nonprofit that provides creative writing education for kids and teenagers, and an adjunct professor at Pace University. She lives in New York City with her wife, Penelope, and two cats, Alice and Jabberwocky. Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls is her first novel. And she’s a proud KWH staffer alum!
Alexandra Villasante has always loved telling stories—though not always with words. She has a BFA in Painting and an MA in Combined Media (that’s art school speak for making work out of anything). Born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, Alex has the privilegio of dreaming in both English and Spanish. Her latest novel, Fireblooms, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and praise from Kirkus and Booklist. Alex’s debut YA novel, The Grief Keeper, was a Fall 2019 Junior Library Guild Gold Selection and winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Children’s Literature/Young Adult Fiction. She's a contributor several Young Adult short story anthologies including, Our Shadows Have Claws, Relit: 16 Latinx Remixes of Classic Stories and We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters Angels and Other Creatures. Alex is a co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival and of the LKBF Latinx Storytellers Conference. When she’s not writing, planning or painting, Alex works for the Highlights Foundation.
Nova Ren Suma is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us as well as A Room Away from the Wolves, both finalists for an Edgar Award, among other acclaimed novels and short stories for young adults. Her latest novel, Wake the Wild Creatures, was published by Little, Brown in 2025. Nova has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and Yaddo. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Stanford Continuing Studies, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Thursday, 3/19/2026
Friday, 3/20/2026
Saturday, 3/21/2026
Sunday, 3/22/2026
Monday, 3/23/2026
Live at the Writers House
A monthly radio show produced at the KWH in collaboration with WXPN
6:30 PM in person
LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration among the people of the Kelly Writers House and WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, we gather at the KWH to record a one-hour show of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art for broadcast by WXPN. Edited by Zach Carduner and produced by Alli Katz, LIVE at the Writers House is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc.
Tuesday, 3/24/2026
Wednesday, 3/25/2026
A conversation with Molly Jong-Fast
12:00 PM in person
co-sponsored by: The Sylvia Kauders Fund and Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts
hosted by: Dick Polman
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Photo credit: Sara Messinger
Molly Jong-Fast is a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Opinion, a MSNBC political analyst, host of the FastPolitics podcast and author of The New York Times best seller How to Lose Your Mother.
A conversation with Elaine Hsieh Chou
Liu Endowed Program
6:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
hosted by: Jo Park
co-sponsored by: the Department of English and the Asian American Studies Program
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Her debut novel Disorientation was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist and Thurber Prize Finalist. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at New York University, her Pushcart Award–winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares and The Atlantic, while her essays appear in The Cut and Vanity Fair. She is a Fred R. Brown Literary Award recipient, a Sundance Episodic Lab Fellow and a Gotham Series Creator to Watch. Her work has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts and Hedgebrook’s Writers-in-Residence Program. Her story collection Where Are You Really From came out from Penguin Press in August 2025.
Thursday, 3/26/2026
Friday, 3/27/2026
Saturday, 3/28/2026
Sunday, 3/29/2026
Monday, 3/30/2026
A READING BY DAVID GRANN
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Grann is the author of many books, including Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Described in the New York Times as a “riveting” work that will “sear your soul,” it was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by the Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and other publications. For middle schoolers, Grann has also released Killers of the Flower Moon: A Young Reader’s Edition, which the School Library Journal called as “imperative and enthralling as its parent text.” Grann holds master’s degrees in international relations (from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) and creative writing (from Boston University). After graduating from Connecticut College, in 1989, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.
Tuesday, 3/31/2026
A Conversation with DAVID GRANN
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00 AM in person
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Grann is the author of many books, including Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Described in the New York Times as a “riveting” work that will “sear your soul,” it was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by the Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and other publications. For middle schoolers, Grann has also released Killers of the Flower Moon: A Young Reader’s Edition, which the School Library Journal called as “imperative and enthralling as its parent text.” Grann holds master’s degrees in international relations (from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) and creative writing (from Boston University). After graduating from Connecticut College, in 1989, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.