April 2015
Wednesday, 4/1
Frank Sherlock with Carlos Soto-Román and Soledad Alfaro-Allah
a Wexler Studio conversation
listen: to an audio
recording of this program
Frank Sherlock facilitates a discussion with Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate, Soledad Alfaro-Allah, and Chilean poet and translator, Carlos Soto-Román. Carlos and Soledad read some of their work and discuss how activism, as well as their Chilean heritage, has influenced their poetry.
Tom Devaney and Joe Massey
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
Thomas Devaney is a poet and author of Runaway Away Goat Cart (Hanging Loose, 2015), Calamity Jane (Furniture Press, 2014), The Picture that Remains (The Print Center, 2014), A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007), The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999), and the nonfiction book Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005). Devaney is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for poetry (2014). He teaches at Haverford College.
Joseph Massey lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), and To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014), and Illocality (Wave Books, forthcoming this year) as well as a dozen chapbooks. His work has also appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Nation, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015).
Thursday, 4/2
A poetry reading by Kevin Young
Brave Testimony Series
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
sponsored by: Center for Africana Studies
Kevin Young is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Book of Hours, which was featured on NPR's "Fresh Air," and editor of eight others. His previous book Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels won a 2012 American Book Award and Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and winner of the PEN Open Award. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (edited with Michael S. Glaser) won a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in poetry. He is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta. See more at: www.kevinyoungpoetry.com.
Friday, 4/3
Saturday, 4/4
Sunday, 4/5
Monday, 4/6
lunch with Michael Vitez
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Dick Polman
RSVP: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
Michael Vitez is a human interest writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has been a reporter for 30 years. Vitez has covered a wide variety of assignments, including presidential campaigns, health reform, the World Series, slaughter and elections in Haiti, and even the quest to grow the first 1,000-pound pumpkin. In recent years, he has concentrated on medical narratives. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1997 for a series of stories titled "Final Choices," for which he followed five people as they approached the ends of their lives, and wrote powerful, intimate narratives about the decisions they made and the choices they faced. Vitez has also written two books. Rocky Stories: Tales of Love, Hope and Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps (with photographer Tom Gralish) is a collection of interviews and photographs of people from all over the nation and the world who came to run those steps like Sylvester Stallone in the Academy Award winning film, Rocky. The Road Back chronicles the story of Matt Miller, a 20-year-old University of Virginia student athlete who survived a horrific bike accident.
A poetry reading by Hiromi Ito and Lucas de Lima
with translator Jeffrey Angles
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
sponsored by: Writers Without Borders
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
listen: to an
conversation between Hiromi Ito and Lucas de Lima with translator
Jeffrey Angles in the Wexler Studio
Hiromi Itō is one of the most prominent women writers of contemporary Japan, with more than a dozen collections of poetry, several works of prose, numerous books of essays, and several major literary prizes to her name . She divides her time between the towns of Encinitas, California and Kumamoto in southern Japan. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of "women's poetry" that swept Japan in the 1980s. She has won many important Japanese literary prizes, including the Takami Jun Prize, the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize, and the Izumi Shikibu Prize.
Lucas de Lima is the author of multiple chapbooks and the full-length Wet Land (Action Books), named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by Dennis Cooper, Entropy, Coldfront, The Volta, and Philadelphia Review of Books. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Evening Will Come, boundary2, and The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing. As a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Penn, he works on indigenous cosmopolitics and Latin American literature.
Jeffrey Angles is an associate professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys and the award-winning translator of several of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation into English of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers. He is also a poet, and his first book of poetry written in Japanese, entitled Hizuke henkō sen (International Date Line), is forthcoming in 2015 from Shichōsha.
Tuesday, 4/7
Kerry Prize Program: Gina DeCagna
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
Under the Kerry Prize, Gina DeCagna researched and explored the multifa ceted world of artists' books — physical, sometimes sculptural, art objects created by visual artists in the book format. She then turned to the creative energy of the Kelly Writers House community to create a collectivist artist book from their submissions. The book was compiled into a collective mediation on a topic many could easily talk about: what it really means to be living, among, or of “the millennial generation.” It is filled with a variety of curated print media contributed by dozens friends of the Writers House — millennials and non-millennials alike. In the artist book, “the millennial” is explored in writings across generations and across genres, images, artworks, and more — with a particular inclusion of the ubiquitous digital technologies millennials utilize for means of communication and expression.
For the Kerry Prize Program in particular, DeCagna will be installing a lengthy, large-scale accordion-style artist book sculpture, entitled /I YOU ME, /that will be opened and spread throughout the space of the Kelly Writers House. The book will be an exploration of interrelations and inter-connectivity between “the self” and “the other” — how we, as individuals, see, understand, and express ourselves within spheres of multiplicity, as in a network or community of existence. Capitalizing on the book's spreadable, interconnected folds, the pages of the book will be playfully suspended, lie on the floor, and zig-zag all throughout the house during the duration of the program.
Written, erased, and rewritten in graphite, the personal pronouns “I”, “YOU”, and “ME” are replicated in graphic scribbles on each book leaf, per every three pages. Participants in the project and attendees of the program will be encouraged to take newly provided graphite pencils and erasers to each repetition of “I”, “YOU”, and “ME” to rework the surface of each book leaf with their own writings, words, drawings, or other media that can reflect or define their existences and how they perceive the existences of others. As the act of erasure signifies the retelling or rewriting of their existences over past layers, only fragments will remain from the past. Participants will be encouraged to introduce themselves, tell a story about themselves, and capture the story of another they talked to during the process. Each floating book leaf filling the spaces of the house will be one component of an entire kaleidoscope, one point within a web of multi-perspectivalism. At the culmination of the project, the book will be de-installed and folded back into a single boxed, but expandable, form documenting the process.
Wednesday, 4/8
lunch with Tish Hamilton
Executive Editor of Runner's World
Povich Journalism Program
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Jamie-Lee Josselyn
RSVP: wh@writing.upenn.edu or (215) 746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Tish Hamilton started her career in journalism answering phones for the publishers of Muppet and Barbie magazines. She then worked for nearly a decade at Rolling Stone, as a copy-editor, line editor, and managing editor, and ran her first marathon. She spent a few years at Outside magazine, the New York Daily News, and Sports Illustrated for Women and ran many more marathons. Today she feels lucky to combine her professional experience with her personal passion at Runner's World, where she has been executive editor since 2003. Her essays have been included in Woman's Best Friend: Dogs and Tales From Another Mother Runner. She lives in Bernardsville, New Jersey, with her 10-year-old daughter and two small dogs. She has run 48 marathons and the misleadingly named Comrades Marathon in South Africa, which is actually 56 miles.
A poetry reading by Matthew Dickman
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Co-sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of
this event
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008), 50 American Plays (co-written with his twin brother Michael Dickman, Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (W.W. Norton & Co, 2012). He is the recipient of The Honickman First Book Prize, The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, and the 2009 Oregon Book Award from Literary Arts of Oregon. His poems have appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, The London Review of Books, Narrative Magazine, Esquire Magazine and The New Yorker among others. Matthew Dickman is the Poetry Editor of Tin House Magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Thursday, 4/9
realarts@penn presents david shumway
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Using two or three rock stars as examples, David Shumway will explore the evolution of rock stardom. Shumway's Rock Star: The Making of Cultural Icons from Elvis to Springsteen by David Shumway is an informal history of rock stardom. It looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars in the context of popular music and culture—Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. It investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed rock stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and rock stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Because of changes in American society and the media industries, rock stars have become much more explicitly political figures than were the stars of Hollywood’s studio era. Rock stars, moreover, are icons of change, though not always progressive, whose public personas read like texts produced collaboratively by the performers themselves, their managers, and record companies. These stars thrive in a variety of media, including recorded music, concert performance, dress, staging, cover art, films, television, video, print, and others.
David R. Shumway is Professor of English, and Literary and Cultural Studies, and the founding Director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen published in 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press. He has also written Michel Foucault (1989), Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (1994), Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (2003), and John Sayles (2012). He is currently working on a book on realism across media in 20th century America.
Friday, 4/10
Celebration of Bob Perelman
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch Part 1: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen Part 1: to an audio recording of this event
watch Part 2: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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In honor of his retirement, friends, colleagues, and students of beloved Penn professor Bob Perelman came together to honor his work as a teacher, scholar, and poet. The event featured informal toasts and reminiscences by Al Filreis, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Kathy Lou Schultz, Sarah Arkebauer, Bruce Andrews, Kristen Gallagher, Dave Espy, Matt Hart, James Sherry, Amy Kaplan, Rachel DuPlessis, Greg Djanikian, Orchid Tierney, and Ariel Reznikoff.
Bob Perelman has published over 15 volumes of poetry, most recently The Future of Memory (Roof Books) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press). His critical work focuses on poetry and modernism. His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press). He has edited Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press), a collection of talks by poets.
Saturday, 4/11
Sunday, 4/12
Monday, 4/13
A meeting of the Hub
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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.
A reading by Jami Attenberg
Cheryl J. Family Fiction 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
Jami Attenberg has written about sex, technology, design, books, television, and urban life for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Print, The Hairpin, Vogue, New York, Elle, Real Simple, The Rumpus, and others. She has contributed to numerous anthologies and also wrote Wicked: The Musical: A Pop-up Compendium. Her debut collection of stories, Instant Love, was published by Crown/Shaye Areheart Books in 2006. She is also the author of two novels, The Kept Man and The Melting Season, both published by Riverhead Books. Her third novel, The Middlesteins, was published in October 2012 by Grand Central Publishing. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, and will be published in England, Taiwan, Russia, Italy, France, Turkey, The Netherlands, Germany and Israel in 2013. It was also a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. A fifth book, Saint Mazie, will be published in 2015 in the U.S., the UK, and Italy. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she fights crime in her spare time.
Tuesday, 4/14
A conversation with journalist Blake Bailey
Povich Journalism Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Paul Hendrickson
Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and he is at work on the authorized biography of Philip Roth. In 2014 he published a memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes. He live in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Wednesday, 4/15
Brodsky Gallery Opening
A Co-Sponsored Creative Ventures Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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Help us celebrate the latest issue of SYMBIOSIS, the annual Penn publication featuring artist/writer collaborations, at this month’s BRODSKY GALLERY OPENING. Enjoy select readings by the latest issue’s contributing writers, browse the new art exhibition, and hear contributors’ collaboration stories, with the chance to mingle with Symbiosis staff and collaborators. Be sure to check out the Facebook event page here.
Thursday, 4/16
Trustees' Council of Penn Women
2:45 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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The Trustees' Council of Penn Women gathered at the Kelly Writers House for a collaborative close reading facilitated by Al Filreis to hear about the spectacular success of our recent Coursera course Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Camara Brown, Sam Apple, Nadia Laher, and Meg Pendoley read from their own original works.
African Voices Series: Novelist NoViolet Bulawayo
Curated by Tsitsi Jaji
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
co-sponsored by: Writers Without Borders and the Provost Interdisciplinary Arts Fund
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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Where can you find new African writing today? On a Beyoncé single, in a feature length film crammed with a-list actors, on the Man-Booker and PEN prize lists, inner publishers' series like the African Poetry Book Fund, on TED-Talks, and right here at Penn. Join us for African Voices, a new series celebrating vibrant writing by women of the African continent. This Fall we welcomed poets Gabeba Baderoon (a pioneering voice of the Muslim experience in South Africa) and TJ Dema (who established the spoken-word scene in Botswana). And now we welcome NoViolet Bulawayo (author of the award-winning novel We Need New Names, set in Zimbabwe and Michigan). This series is supported by the Provost's Interdisciplinary Arts and Culture Fund, Kelly Writers House Writers Across Borders, and Africana Studies and curated by Tsitsi Jaji. All readings are free, open to the public, and followed by discussion with the authors.
NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names (May 2013) which has been recognized with the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place), and the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Fiction Selection. We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and selected to the New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list, and others. NoViolet’s story “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.
NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she now teaches as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction. NoViolet grew up in Zimbabwe.
Friday, 4/17
Saturday, 4/18
Sunday, 4/19
Monday, 4/20
Feminism/s presents Katherine Hubbard
Notes from Utah. Notes on Gray.
7:15 in the Arts Cafe
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Katherine Hubbard is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice recognizes the critical intersection of photography, performance and writing as a mark of ontological refusal through which we may re-look at how we structure meaning. Her most recent solo exhibition Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else, a landscape photography show of work made over the past 3 years in southern Utah was presented at Capricious 88, NY. Additionally, Hubbard’s work has been exhibited at Renseriet, Stockholm, Sweden; Vox Populi, PA; University of Maryland Stamp Gallery, MD; The Museum of Art and Design, NY; Higher Pictures, NY and Murray Guy, NY. Hubbard maintains an ongoing collaboration with A.K. Burns exploring the history of queer esthetics, iterations of which have been exhibited at Recess, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Art and Design, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and The Museum of Modern Art, all in New York. Forthcoming in 2015 she will present Small Town Sex Shop, a conceptual clothing project in collaboration with Savannah Knoop at Recess, NY. Hubbard has an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design.
Tuesday, 4/21
A poetry reading by John Yau
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Charles Bernstein
introduced by: Ashley Chang
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Recent books include A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008) and Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). His reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Times. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2006 – 2011). In January 2012, he started the online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend, with three other writers.He has collaborated with many artists, including Norman Bluhm, EdPaschke, Peter Saul, Pat Steir, Jürgen Partenheimer, Norbert Prangenberg, Squeak Carnwath, Thomas Nozkowski, Max Gimblett, and Richard Tuttle, on different projects. These collaborations have been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City: the Bonn Kunstmuseum, Germany; and the Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, Australia. Yau has received grants and fellowships for his poetry, fiction, and criticism from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, Peter S. Reed Foundation, Ingram Merrill Foundation, and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation. His awards include a General Electric Foundation Award, a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Brendan Gill Award. In 2002, he was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.
Wednesday, 4/22
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
7:30 in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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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, 4/23
100 Years of Solitude: Marathon reading
9:00 AM in the Arts Cafe
A Creative Ventures Program
watch: a video recording of Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, or Part 7 of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5,
Part 6, or
Part 7
of this event
For our first annual Bernheimer Symposium, former Program Coordinator Erin Gautsche invented for us what has become an annual tradition. Each year, the Hub selects a book to read aloud, straight through, and we celebrate the book with extravagant decorations, food, and props all derived from the text.
Friday, 4/24
Saturday, 4/25
Sunday, 4/26
Monday, 4/27
Jessica Hagedorn
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. Her novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of Danger and Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Hagedorn’s work in theatre includes the musical play Most Wanted, a collaboration with composer Mark Bennett and director Michael Greif at La Jolla Playhouse; Fe in the Desert and Stairway to Heaven for Campo Santo in San Francisco; and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters, presented at La Jolla Playhouse and at the NYSF/Public Theater (directed by Michael Greif), at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City (directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera), and in Manila (directed by Bobby Garcia). Hagedorn wrote the screenplay for Fresh Kill, a feature film directed by Shu Lea Cheang, and scripts for the experimental animated series The Pink Palace, created for the first season of the Oxygen Network. From 1975 to 1985, she was the leader of a band called the Gangster Choir. One of her signature songs, “Tenement Lover,” is included in John Giorno’s ’80s downtown music anthology A Diamond Hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse. Her honors and prizes include a Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Kesselring Prize Honorable Mention for Dogeaters, and an NEA-TCG Playwriting Residency Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab. Hagedorn has taught at the Yale School of Drama, NYU, and Columbia University. She is the Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the MFA Writing Program at LIU Brooklyn.
Tuesday, 4/28
Brunch with Jessica Hagedorn
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
Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. Her novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of Danger and Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Hagedorn’s work in theatre includes the musical play Most Wanted, a collaboration with composer Mark Bennett and director Michael Greif at La Jolla Playhouse; Fe in the Desert and Stairway to Heaven for Campo Santo in San Francisco; and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters, presented at La Jolla Playhouse and at the NYSF/Public Theater (directed by Michael Greif), at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City (directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera), and in Manila (directed by Bobby Garcia). Hagedorn wrote the screenplay for Fresh Kill, a feature film directed by Shu Lea Cheang, and scripts for the experimental animated series The Pink Palace, created for the first season of the Oxygen Network. From 1975 to 1985, she was the leader of a band called the Gangster Choir. One of her signature songs, “Tenement Lover,” is included in John Giorno’s ’80s downtown music anthology A Diamond Hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse. Her honors and prizes include a Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Kesselring Prize Honorable Mention for Dogeaters, and an NEA-TCG Playwriting Residency Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab. Hagedorn has taught at the Yale School of Drama, NYU, and Columbia University. She is the Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the MFA Writing Program at LIU Brooklyn.
CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST WINNERS READING
5:30PM in the Arts Cafe
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Prize-winning poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and writing in translation. Hosted by Greg Djanikian, Director of Penn’s Creative Writing program.
Wednesday, 4/29
A READING BY LYNN LEVIN’S CREATIVE WRITING CLASS
2:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
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Come hear triolets, Fibonacci poems, elemental odes, cameo cinquains, unanswerable letter poems, and much more, as the students in Lynn Levin’s English 10 class share their poetic achievements. These students hail from a wide variety of majors, so you are bound to hear poems on not-the-usual subjects.
GREG DJANIKIAN’s CLASS READING
5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
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Students in Greg Djanikian’s poetry writing course studied the rhythm and expressiveness of their language, while also exploring the things of this world, sometimes in new relationships and, perhaps, with broader vision. Come listen to reading from their final portfolios.