April 2022
Friday, 4/1
Saturday, 4/2
Sunday, 4/3
Monday, 4/4
A conversation with Dan Rottenberg
The Education of a Journalist
12:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
hosted by: Dick Polman
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Dan Rottenberg has been chief editor of seven innovative publications, most recently Broad Street Review, an online arts and culture salon he created in 2005. As an advocate for free expression and alternative media, he successfully defended seven libel suits and received Temple University’s Free Speech Award in 1992. His twelve published books include Finding Our Fathers, which launched the modern Jewish genealogy movement in 1977, Death of a Gunfighter, which was honored as the best Western history book of 2008, and, most recently, The Education of a Journalist. He has written more than 300 articles for such magazines as Town & Country, Reader’s Digest, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Civilization, American Benefactor, Bloomberg Personal Finance, TV Guide, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Chicago, and many others. He served as a consultant in 1981 when Forbes magazine launched its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans. His syndicated film commentaries appeared in monthly city magazines around the U.S. from 1971 to 1983. Earlier in his career, he was a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, executive editor of Philadelphia Magazine, managing editor of Chicago Journalism Review, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and editor of the Commercial Review, a daily newspaper in Portland, Indiana. He was born and raised in New York City and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, a piano teacher. Their two adult daughters live and work in New York City.
Noticing as a Writer
Beltran Family Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Curated by: Sam Apple, 2021-2022 Beltran Family Award winner
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
Penn students, alumni, and guest writers will celebrate the art of "noticing as a writer" by sharing some of the strange and absurd things they've observed of late.
Tuesday, 4/5
A Conversation with Liaquat Ahamed
2021-22 Weber Symposium
5:00 PM (ET) reception | 6:00 PM (ET) conversation
Hosted by: Al Filreis
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
In his best-selling, Pulitzer prize-winning book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed discusses the insights we can gain from the Great Depression about the forces that cause global financial crises, the similarities between the breakdown in the 1920s and the more recent meltdown, and the actions economic officials need to take in order to reverse downward spirals in the world economy and avoid repeat of that cataclysm.
Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years and currently serves as Director of Putnam Funds. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities.
Wednesday, 4/6
A poetry reading by Patricia Smith
Brave Testimony: A Celebration of Poetry of the African Diaspora
6:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Sponsored by Africana Studies
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically-acclaimed books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow (CityFiles Press, 2015), a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1998), Big Towns Big Talk (Zoland Books, 2002), Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha, 1991); the children's book Janna and the Kings (Lee & Low, 2013), and the history Africans in America (Mariner, 1999), a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books, 2012).
Thursday, 4/7
Friday, 4/8
Saturday, 4/9
Sunday, 4/10
Monday, 4/11
A Conversation with John Freeman
Applebaum Editors and Publishers Series
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Hosted by: Paul Hendrickson
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
John Freeman is founder of the literary annual Freeman's, executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and the author and editor of ten books including The Park, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, Dictionary of the Undoing, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the New York Times, and been translated into over twenty languages. His next book is Wind Trees, a collection of poems, forthcoming in October from Copper Canyon. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York City and is writer in residence at NYU.
Tuesday, 4/12
Stand-Ups Sit Down
Emmy Blotnick and Gary Gulman, with host Lew Schneider (C'83)
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
Emmy Blotnick is a stand-up/actress/writer based in NY. Blotnick has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where she was also a staff writer. She was featured in the New York Times as a “Savvy Comic” who shines, and her Comedy Central Half Hour premiered in 2018, followed by the release of her debut comedy album, Party Nights, in 2019. Previously, she was head writer for the Comedy Central series The President Show, and she has been highlighted as one of Comedy Central’s Comics to Watch. Currently, Emmy is a writer on HBO Max’s Pause with Sam Jay.
Over 25 years in comedy, Gary Gulman has established himself as an eminent performer and peerless writer. His latest stand-up special for HBO, The Great Depresh, is a universally acclaimed, tour de force look at mental illness, equal parts hilarious and inspiring. He has made four hour-long specials and has appeared as a stand-up on every single late night show. He has appeared as an actor in Joker and Inside Amy Schumer.
Lew Schneider (C'83) is a writer, producer and director of the ABC comedy, The Goldbergs. Other credits include his own HBO stand-up special, and the primetime shows American Dad, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Men of a Certain Age (which won a Peabody Award but very few people watched), and Everybody Loves Raymond (which won Emmy Awards and more people watched).
Wednesday, 4/13
SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT
8:30 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
Watch: here
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. You'll have three minutes at the Kelly Writers House podium to share what you want!
Thursday, 4/14
A meeting of the writers house planning committee
5:00 PM in the Writers House Garden
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.
Friday, 4/15
Saturday, 4/16
Sunday, 4/17
Monday, 4/18
A conversation with Dana Stevens
Author of CAMERA MAN: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
2021–2022 Hartman Symposium
6:30 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Hosted by: Professor Emily Wilson, Classical Studies
c-sponsored by: Comparative Literature and Theory and Cinema and Media Studies
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
The legendary silent film comedian Buster Keaton was born in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers first publicly projected moving pictures. In her new book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, Dana Stevens, the longtime film critic at Slate, spins the implications of this convergence into a unique work of literary nonfiction about how one great filmmaker’s life intertwined with the birth of a medium and of modern American life. Camera Man is a meditation on modernity that weaves together the story of one of the most enigmatic and beloved artists of the last century with the events and cultural forces that made his life and work possible. Propelled by Stevens’ wide-ranging insight and pellucid prose, this is the first book to take Buster Keaton’s fascinating life and timelessly funny work as a prism for understanding the dawn of the age of technologically reproduced images, which is now the place we all live.
Dana Stevens is one of the country’s best-known film critics and culture podcasters, with a loyal social media following. She is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of two Slate podcasts, the Culture Gabfest and the Spoiler Special. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Bookforum and Aperture magazine. She lives in New York City with her family and can be found on Twitter and Instagram as @thehighsign. This is her first book.
Tuesday, 4/19
A reading by Carlos Decena
From his book Circuits of the Sacred: Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean
6:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
hosted by: Al Filreis
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Carlos Ulises Decena is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer. A member of the Rutgers University faculty since 2005, Decena teaches in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He published his first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men in 2011. Circuits of the Sacred: Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean will be published in Spring 2023 by Duke University Press.
Circuits of the Sacred: Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean is a visionary study of transnational Black Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit. Modeling what Decena calls a faggotology, or the discernment of the divine in disreputable erotics and sex, this study performs a gathering to center our bodies, in their enlarged capacities, as instruments to experience the mystical in the banal. Decena argues that paths to the divine swerve from the transparent “I” of the academic, drifting toward the intuitive, the sensorial, and the disreputable. Circuits disrupts, expands, and unmoors Blackness and Black study from the myopia of US-centered coordinates to account for its transit in and through the Caribbean. Turning to memoir, ethnography in Santo Domingo, Havana and New Jersey, theoretical analysis, and creative writing, Decena reckons with racially-marked upward mobility and deracination, gay male coming of age, masculine training, sustained family loyalty, religious initiation and travel, and the mystical in gay male sex. His text multiplies pronouns, narrative voices, and writing genres to model dissociate storytelling as channelings of voices, ancestors, deities, and spirits. Circuits of the Sacred thinks of Blackness through the metaphor of the “circuit” as multi-pronged and multi-sensorial field. While it documents how one body moves, imagines, witnesses, and remembers, the chapters of the study operate as nodal points energized within the larger network of observations, insights, stories, anecdotes, and theories. A feminist pilgrimage and extended conversation with the dead, Decena’s study innovates in Black Latinx studies by centering the radicalized exuberance of expressive praxis as critique and theory, turning the academic project to honor ancestors, map transnational journeys, and offer a perverse gospel for Black queer children of the future.
Wednesday, 4/20
Fayyaz Vellani: reading, conversation, and book party
Liu Program
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Cafe and on YouTube
Hosted by: Sara Byala
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Watch: here
Tea With Ms. Tanzania by Fayyaz Vellani is the story of a woman’s struggle to reconcile her estranged son with her revolutionary past. After the death of her husband in London, Gulnar Jaffar writes letters to her son Zain in Glasgow. These letters describe her life in 1960s Tanzania, from being caught up in a mutiny, to attending a tea party for the first lady. Pining for Zain’s understanding, Gulnar reveals how the fraught atmosphere of postcolonial East Africa has shaped their mother-son relationship.
Fayyaz Vellani is a British-Canadian writer who has lived in London, New York, and Philadelphia, where he teaches Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in The Bookends Review, The F-Word Magazine, and Disability and Society.
Thursday, 4/21
Marathon reading: Kafka on the Shore
9:00 AM (ET) – late night in the Arts Café
Supported by: Creative Ventures
SIGN UP AS A READER HERE
For our first annual Bernheimer Symposium, KWH 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 and food, all derived from the text. This year’s book is Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a story in which cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. Want to help with planning? Email wh@writing.upenn.edu to jump in! We’ll be making cats and fish to fill the Arts Café – and will soon get to work on a delicious menu.
Friday, 4/22
Saturday, 4/23
Sunday, 4/24
Monday, 4/25
A reading by Doug Glanville
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Watch: here
Doug Glanville was raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, and graduated from the school of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the first African American Ivy League graduate to play in Major League Baseball (MLB). A nine-year MLB veteran, Glanville was a first round draft pick by the Chicago Cubs which led to his long career with the Cubs, Texas Rangers, and the Philadelphia Phillies. After retiring from baseball in 2005, Glanville began sharing his experience and knowledge through his writing, speaking, and sports commentary. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View (2010). Glanville is also nominated by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for a 2021 Sports Emmy Award (The Dick Schaap Outstanding Writing Award – Short Form) for his “Enough” video essay produced in collaboration with ESPN’s Outside The Lines, E60, an SportsCenter. Currently, Glanville is a baseball analyst for ESPN’s many baseball- and sports-centered shows including Sports Center, Baseball Tonight, and other ESPN programming. He is also a baseball analyst for Marquee Sports Network where he covers the Chicago Cubs and hosts and produces the show “Class is in Session with Doug Glanville,” a show concept he created. Glanville also co-hosts a weekly dive into baseball with colleague Jayson Stark on their podcast titled “Starkville” appearing on The Athletic’s Baseball Show and also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible. He is a contributor to ESPN.com, The Athletic, The Undefeated, and New York Times where he offers insight about baseball and how the sport translates to everyday life. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, U.S. News and World Report, Time Magazine, and El Nuevo Día, as well as other publications.
Tuesday, 4/26
A conversation with Doug Glanville
Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
10:00AM in the Arts Cafe
rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu
Watch: here
Doug Glanville was raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, and graduated from the school of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the first African American Ivy League graduate to play in Major League Baseball (MLB). A nine-year MLB veteran, Glanville was a first round draft pick by the Chicago Cubs which led to his long career with the Cubs, Texas Rangers, and the Philadelphia Phillies. After retiring from baseball in 2005, Glanville began sharing his experience and knowledge through his writing, speaking, and sports commentary. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View (2010). Glanville is also nominated by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for a 2021 Sports Emmy Award (The Dick Schaap Outstanding Writing Award – Short Form) for his “Enough” video essay produced in collaboration with ESPN’s Outside The Lines, E60, an SportsCenter. Currently, Glanville is a baseball analyst for ESPN’s many baseball- and sports-centered shows including Sports Center, Baseball Tonight, and other ESPN programming. He is also a baseball analyst for Marquee Sports Network where he covers the Chicago Cubs and hosts and produces the show “Class is in Session with Doug Glanville,” a show concept he created. Glanville also co-hosts a weekly dive into baseball with colleague Jayson Stark on their podcast titled “Starkville” appearing on The Athletic’s Baseball Show and also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible. He is a contributor to ESPN.com, The Athletic, The Undefeated, and New York Times where he offers insight about baseball and how the sport translates to everyday life. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, U.S. News and World Report, Time Magazine, and El Nuevo Día, as well as other publications.
Wednesday, 4/27
Creative Writing Program Honors Thesis Reading
5:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Sponsored by: the Creative Writing Program
Watch: here
A number of our graduating seniors have been working hard to complete their Creative Writing thesis projects — long-form creative literary works in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, and mixed genres that serve as the capstones to their time at Penn as writers. We will celebrate their hard work on Wednesday, April 27, at 5:00 PM, with a live and livestreamed reading of several honors theses.