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April 2011

Friday, 4/1

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 4/2

Whenever We Feel Like It Presents

Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, and Meg Barboza

2:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event on PennSound


Joshua Beckman
Anthony McCann
Meg Barboza

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of six books, including Take It (Wave Books, 2009), Shake and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Poker by Tomaz Salamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award, and Five Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.


Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of I ♥ Your Fate (forthcoming from Wave Books in 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these two collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He has taught English as a Second Language in the former Czechoslovakia, South Korea and Nicaragua, as well as in New York City. Currently he lives in Los Angeles, where he works with Machine Project and teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts.


Meg Barboza received her MFA in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared in P-Queue, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, 1913, notnostrums, Little Red Leaves, and elsewhere. Her poetry reviews have appeared in Colorado Review. Formerly the manager for the Powell's North Bookstore Reading Series in Chicago, Meg now lives and works in New York City.


The Elements of Playwriting

a workshop with Suzanne Miller

1:00 PM - 4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu (REQUIRED; spots limited)

This three-hour workshop examines the basic elements of creating a dramatic script. By reading excerpts from established works and writing their own scenes, participants will explore the discrete components of a play (e.g. premise, character, stakes, language, plot and conflict) and discover how these pieces come together to create a theatrical experience. The workshop will also provide strategies on how to develop a work-in-progress as well as how to transform a brand new idea into a scene. LIMITED SPOTS. Please RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu.

Suzanne Maynard Miller's plays include Young Love, Flirting With the Deep End (Dramatic Publishing, 2007); Beatrice; The Handwriting, the Soup, and the Hats; and Abigail's Atlas. Her work has been produced in Los Angeles, Seattle, Providence, New Haven and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Maynard Miller has taught playwriting and expository writing at Brown University and at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been an artist-in-residence at public schools in Seattle, Providence, Brooklyn, and the Bronx and a playwright-in-residence at Annex Theater in Seattle, where she was a company member from 1989-1996. Maynard Miller has also led playwriting workshops for incarcerated women and was a founding member of Kidswrite, a Seattle-based literacy program for fifth graders. Currently, she teaches in the English Department at the New York City College of Technology/CUNY.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BA, 1989), Maynard Miller received her MFA in playwriting from Brown University in 1998. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.


Sunday, 4/3

Monday, 4/4

A Talk by Jerome McGann

Philology in a New Key: Poe, Decentered Culture, and Critical Method

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Charles Bernstein
co-sponsored by: the English Department and EDIT: Processing Writing Technologies
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event on PennSound

Jerome McGann is the author of The Textual Condition, Romantic Ideology, The Beauty of Inflections, Radiant Textuality, Swinburne: An Experiment in Critism, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, and The Point Is to Change It and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. As a textual scholar, McGann who has created editions of the work of Byron, Swinburne, and Rosetti, as well as the Rosetti web archive. He is also the founder of the Applied Research in Patacriticism digital laboratory McGann teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is John Stewart Bryan University Professor.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 4/5

CPCW LITERARY JOURNALISM FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

featuring Fellowship winners Kim Eisler and Maggie McGrath, and guest editors Kate Buford and Marilyn Johnson (C'76)

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-cponsored by: the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing
rsvp to: wh@writing.upenn.edu
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Join us for a roundtable discussion of work by Kimberly Eisler (C'11) and Maggie McGrath (C'11), winners of the 2010-2011 CPCW Literary Journalism Fellowship: "The Stock in Bonds: The Fraternal Roots of Wall Street" (by Kim Eisler) and "The Long and Rusty Road: New York City's High Line made it look easy, but converting old rails into soaring urban parks is a tough job" (by Maggie McGrath). Joining the discussion will be: journalists and guest editors Marilyn Johnson (C'76) and Kate Buford.

The Future of Journalism

a panel discussion featuring Anthony DeCurtis, Dick Polman, Paul Hendrickson, and Avery Rome, moderated by Al Filreis

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

This special gathering will celebrate a very generous donation made by Maury Povich (Penn '62) and his wife Connie Chung. Maury's gift to the Kelly Writers House (a $1 million endowment) will support all journalism programs and events at the Writers House forever: The Povich Fund for Journalism Programs at the Kelly Writers House.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 4/6

Dante and Shakespeare: Translation and Performance

a workshop and lunch with Robin Kirkpatrick

12:00 pm in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: David Wallace
co-sponsored by: the English Department
rsvp to: wh@writing.upenn.edu
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Robin Kirkpatrick is Professor of Italian and English Literatures at Cambridge University where he has taught for thirty years on the Faculties of Modern and Medieval Languages, English and Divinity. His books includes studies of Dante's Commedia, the European Renaissance, and Shakespeare. His poetry involves sustained verse-sequences—sometimes theological in character, sometimes narrative in character. His verse translation of Dante's Commedia was published by Penguin Classics in three volumes (with introductions and notes) between 2006 and 2007. Recently, he has been concerned to develop performance studies at Cambridge through workshops, involving professionals and early career artists as well as undergraduates. In April 2009, these exercises produced a staging of Experience Dante—a programme of newly composed and experimental scores, dance pieces, film, theatrical improvisations and visual installations, all responding to the architectural possibilities offered by the modern spaces of Robinson College. In 2010 he directed an international conference where questions relating to the performing arts were pursued in an academic arena. These developments are googleable on the website P*CEA. A further programme of new performance pieces is planned for 2011.

Thomson Guster

Junior Fellows Presentation

Heat Map #9 Release Party

6:00 pm in the Arts Cafe

The ninth issue of Heat Map has just crash landed on this sorry excuse for a world, so come celebrate with the staff before the afterglow fades.

Inside Heat Map #9 you'll find the latest entry in our catalog of secret punk histories, narcotic digressions, millenarian obsessions and mockeries, the new Ooze (reviews/interviews), and a repository of assertions so violently boneheaded they are guaranteed to kill the mood no matter what's going on. Outside of Heat Map #9 you'll find nothing but trouble no matter how you slice it. It's an easy choice if you ask me.

You can pick up a copy of the new issue, down some brews, scarf some slices, bring your personal problems to the attention of an ancient Chinese oracle, wash out the wrinkles in your brain with a video barrage, take psychological tests to help discover the "next big thing," do the limbo with your IQ, and run a gauntlet of literary experiments with friends and strangers as we together lay the groundwork for Heat Map #10. It's like punk rock with words: you don't need talent, just an attitude.

You are invited.

Bring your pals.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 4/7

Nothing Elegant – A Stein Celebration

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

Art is made up of moments. Moments of inspiration. Power. Emotion. Grace. Passion. These moments collided in Paris in 1911 and changed the path of art and conventional creativity. There will be another spectacular convergence exactly 100 years later in Philadelphia, April 7, 2011–May 1, 2011.

The Kelly Writers House celebrates Gertrude Stein with "Nothing Elegent – A Stein Celebration." In true salon fashion, this event will feature a variety of "acts" – Stein read aloud, musical performances, interactive theater, academic engagement, visual arts and special "historical" guests. A reception to follow will feature foods from the time, including recipes from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. This is a community event, and we want to invoke the creative spirit of that time period, so all ideas and people are welcome. If you would like to "present" at the salon, please contact Erin Gautsche at gautsche@writing.upenn.edu

This event is part of the Philadelphia Festival of Fine Arts, organized by The Kimmel Center.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 4/8

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 4/9

celebration of The Blacktop

Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program

3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Join us for a celebration of The Blacktop—an online magazine for Philadelphia youth (of all ages) run by Writers House staffer (and Penn sophomore) Allyson Even. The event will feature performances by students published in the magazine.

Sunday, 4/10

Megawords Zine Workshop Final Celebration and Swap

2:30pm - 4pm in the Arts Cafe

For workshop participants only

Monday, 4/11

7-up on Seven

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Seven people speak for seven minutes each about all things "seven," featuring: Arielle Brousse on the seven deadly sins, Zach Carduner on Septa's #7 bus, Randall Couch on the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Tim Corrigan on sevens in film, Al Filreis on Mickey Mantle, Lee Huttner on Dante's magnificent seven, and the world premiere screening of a film by seven-year old McCreary twins, Caleb and Malcolm.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 4/12

Whenever We Feel Like It Presents

writers from the Kelly Writers House Hub

Valeria Tsygankova, Violette Carb, Kirsten Saracini, Richard Thomson, Molly O'Neill, Kristen Martin, Keri Taub, MacKenzie Harper, and Asher Lewis

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 4/13

Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.

Speakeasy is an open mic night held at the Kelly Writers House every other Wednesday evening. It's an opportunity for writers to share their work, or the work of others, in a friendly setting. Speakeasy was founded in 1997 and continues to be an important part of the regular Writers House programming series. We welcome poets, storytellers, singers, musicians, and anything in between to share their voices with us in the Arts Cafe twice a month. As always: Poetry, prose, anything goes!

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 4/14

A conversation with Ruth Gruber

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

moderated by: Al Filries
co-sponsored by: the Jewish Studies Program and the Wexler Fund for Programs in Jewish Life and Culture
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Ruth Gruber is an award-winning Jewish American journalist, photographer, and humanitarian. She was born in Brooklyn in 1911 and is the author of nineteen books, including the National Jewish Book Award-winning biography Raquela (1978) and Witness (2007), a chronicle of her 80-year career as a correspondent and photojournalist, during which time she covered such events as the rise of Nazi Germany. She is the subject of a new documentary, Ahead of Time, which premiered last fall.

A poetry reading with Kit Robinson

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Kit Robinson is the author of Determination (Cuneiform, 2010), The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009), Train I Ride (BookThug, 2009), and 17 other books of poetry. A co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980 (Mode A, 2006-2010), Robinson lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahia Son.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 4/15

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 4/16

Sunday, 4/17

Monday, 4/18

Hub Meeting

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: jalowent@writing.upenn.edu

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 4/19

A poetry reading by Quincy Scott Jones and Holly Melgard

presented by the Emergency Reading Series

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.

Quincy Scott Jones earned a Bachelor's degree from Brown University, a Master's degree from Temple University, and $100 once working as supermarket clown. His work has been or is forthcoming in African American Review, Journal of Pan African Studies, Water~Stone Review, California Quarterly, and Let Loose on the World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75. With Nina Sharma he co-created the Nor'easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. Jones' first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press in 2009.


Currently a PhD student in Buffalo's Poetics Program, Holly Melgard is the incoming co-editor of P-Queue (journal of prose, line, and verse), ongoing editor of Con-Verse (constraint-based trans-crip/lat-ion series), former editor of Slightly West (Evergreen-based multi-media journal), and forthcoming author of the poetry chapbook Narcsolicitation (TROLL THREAD). Sections of her manuscript Echochambermusic have been published or are forthcoming in Boog City, Scrap Paper, PRESS, Wheelhouse Magazine, TROLL THREAD, M-Scape, Wikipedia, and Craigslist.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 4/20

A talk by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

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.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is the author of five books of poetry: Dear Future Boyfriend, Hot Teen Slut, Working Class Represent, Oh, Terrible Youth and Everything is Everything. She is also the author of the non-fiction book, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, which The Washington Post named as one of five Notable Books on Exploring Poetry in 2008. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Cristin moved to New York City at the age of 17. At age 19, she founded the three-time National Poetry Slam championship poetry series NYC-Urbana, which is still held weekly at the NYC's famed Bowery Poetry Club. Her work has been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendancies, Rattle, Barrelhouse, decomP, kill author, Conduit and La Petite Zine, among others. She has lectured and performed throughout the U.S. and Australia, including the Sydney Opera House in Australia (2003), Joe's Pub in New York City (2002), the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles (2010) and over 100 universities and colleges. Cristin is using her ArtsEdge residency to write a book on the life and times of Thomas Dent Mutter, founder of Philadelphia's (in)famous Mutter Museum, and will be teaching a course on non-fiction poetry and prose in the Spring semester. For more information, please visit her website at: www.aptowicz.com

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 4/21

A reading by novelist Sam Munson

presented by the Wexler Family Endowed Fund for Programs in Jewish Life and Culture

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Michelle Taransky
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.

Sam Munson's writing has appeared in The National, the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Commentary, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Observer, The Utopian, and numerous other publications. Munson's first novel, The November Criminals, is the story of high-school senior Addison Schacht, a drug dealer and aspiring classicist, and his well-intentioned but inept investigation into his classmate Kevin Broadus's murder.


Reading by students in Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's Poetry / Non-Fiction Class

1:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event.

Open to the public. Free food and drinks.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 4/22

KITSI WATTERSON’S WRITING & REMEMBERING: A MEMOIR WORKSHOP

2:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of part 1 of this event via KWH-TV
watch: a video recording of part 2 of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of part 1 of this event.
listen: to an audio recording of part 2 of this event.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 4/23

Sunday, 4/24

Monday, 4/25

A reading by Marjorie Perloff

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: SEATING STRICTLY LIMITED, please RSVP to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.

Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost American critics of modern and contemporary poetry. Her work has been concerned with describing, evaluating and—at times—advocating for the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating them to major currents of modernist and postmodernist activity in all the arts.

She is the author of many books and hundreds of essays. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media appeared in 1991 and sought to situate the flight from "transparency" (language aiming to appear "natural," to sound like "real" talk) to "artifice" (poetic language foregrounding its own artificiality). Her 1981 book, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, examines the continuities from modernist to postmodernist culture, a concept that has remained central in her work. Perloff's most recent book, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, explores contemporary poetry's embrace of "unoriginal" writing through choice, framing, and language.

Marjorie Perloff's energies as a writer and teacher have been devoted to creating a public for the work of writers whom others have wanted to dismiss as too difficult, obscure, or marginal. Her own writing is anything but that; as the critic Frank Kermode has said, Marjorie Perloff is fun to read. She writes to explain, and communicates through vivid juxtapositions, formulations, and examples. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and is currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California.

The poet Peter Barry has called Perloff "a theorist whose work has maintained its distinctiveness in the face of the rapid homogenization of literary criticism and theory ... We need her distinctive voice more than ever as literary theory enters its third millennium."

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 4/26

A brunch conversation with Marjorie Perloff

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

10:00 AM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: SEATING STRICTLY LIMITED, please RSVP to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.

A reading by students in Lynn Levin's Creative Writing Class

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

This workshop-style class is an introduction to the pleasures of the writing process. Students will benefit from in-depth readings and constructive critical support in a class that fosters a community of writers. We will spend half the semester writing poems, and the other half writing fiction. Some of each meeting will be devoted to reading poems or a short story by established authors, with the emphasis on reading as writers rather than scholars. Experimentation and revision will be encouraged. Class participation and attendance are vital. We will have some brief in-class writing exercises and a variety of take-home assignments designed to help students generate and shape work. Students will turn in a final portfolio, which will include both poetry and prose.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 4/27

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 4/28

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 4/29

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 4/30