September 2019
Sunday, 9/1
Monday, 9/2
Tuesday, 9/3
Wednesday, 9/4
Thursday, 9/5
Other Women Don't Tell You: The Poetics of Motherhood
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Keetje Kuipers, and Airea Matthews
Supported by the Fund for Feminist Projects
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
What makes poetry a fitting vessel for the experience of motherhood? We invite you to the Writers House for a reading and discussion with three poet mothers. Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Keetje Kuipers, and Airea Matthews will read from their newest collections and discuss how motherhood is integral to their poetics.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and TriQuarterly. Her work has been selected for Best New Poets, the Williams Carlos Williams University Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and New South’s Poetry Prize. Julia is the editor of Construction Magazine and writes a blog about motherhood.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, including Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Poetry Foundation bestseller. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club pick for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Narrative, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Orion, The Believer, and over a hundred other magazines. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. Kuipers has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, among other honors. She now teaches at Seattle’s Hugo House and serves as Senior Editor at Poetr!y Northwest.
Airea D. Matthews (C’94) is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in Best American Poets, Callaloo, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and The James Merrill House. One of Matthews's current projects includes a cross-genre book that explores politics, poverty, race and class. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and is a founding member of the Philadelphia-based Riven Collective, a multidisciplinary arts collaborative.
Friday, 9/6
KELLY WRITERS HOUSE ACTIVITIES FAIR
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM in the Class of 1942 Garden
Want to get involved at Kelly Writers House? The Kelly Writers House Activities Fair is an opportunity for new and returning students to learn about student-led Writers House activities and initiatives, including magazines, podcasts, writing groups, community outreach, zine making, film production, and more. Stop by for snacks — and to chat with student leaders and representatives of Curiouser, DoubleSpeak, Excelano, The F-Word, Impact, The Moviegoer, Penn Appetit, The Robinson Press, Write On!, and other magazines and groups. All are welcome! Questions? Contact Writers House director Jessica at jalowent@writing.upenn.edu.
Saturday, 9/7
Sunday, 9/8
Monday, 9/9
A meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
RSVP: jalowent@writing.upenn.edu
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.
Tuesday, 9/10
The Word Made Manifest
Text in Handmade Paper
Brodsky Gallery Opening
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM throughout the first floor
Curated by Mary Tasillo of the Common Press, this exhibition brings together work from artists working with handmade paper as an explicit art form. The pieces in this exhibition feature text, wherein the text is physically part of the piece of paper. Techniques range from watermarking to shaped pages to an array of approaches to stenciling pigmented paper pulp into the sheet of paper while it’s still wet and freshly formed. Experience the word and the page becoming one.
This opening event for The Word Made Manifest show will feature a hands-on paper-making demonstration, led by The Soapbox, a nonprofit community print shop. All are welcome to participate!
Wednesday, 9/11
The Method to the Madness
Lunch with journalist Aaron Short
Kauders Lunch Series
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Dick Polman
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
Join us for a discussion of The Method to the Madness: Donald Trump’s Ascent as Told by Those Who Were Hired, Fired, Inspired and Inaugurated, a candid and revelatory oral history based on over one hundred interviews. Who is Donald Trump? What is it like to work beside him, to be screamed at by him? How does he develop his ideas, and how did he learn Twitter in his 60s? How was it, between 2000 and 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy in the lobby of Trump Tower, that he was able to identify an unserved political constituency, hone a persuasive message that appealed to their needs, and deliver it effectively, despite intense media opposition? The Method to the Madness answers these questions.
Aaron Short (C’03) has reported on Donald Trump’s political aspirations for over a decade. He is a Brooklyn-based journalist whose work appears in the New York Post, the Daily Beast, and Vice. Short graduated from Penn in 2003, with a double major in political science and history.
Speakeasy Open Mic Night
7:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
Our student-run open mic night 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.
Thursday, 9/12
A conversation with John Carreyrou
Weber Symposium
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Al Filreis
RSVP: mingo@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM
Established by Stacey (W’85) and Jeff Weber, the annual Weber symposium strives to emphasize the importance of clarity in writing about finance and economics by featuring guest speakers whose work reflects this commitment to lucid prose.
John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, a bestselling book about the Theranos scandal. For his coverage of Theranos in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Carreyrou was awarded George Polk, Gerald Loeb and Barlett & Steele awards. Bad Blood won the Financial Times and McKinsey business book of the year prize and the Investigative Reporters and Editors book award. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize. Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn, NY with his family.
Friday, 9/13
Saturday, 9/14
Sunday, 9/15
Monday, 9/16
Tuesday, 9/17
Time Sensitive: Marjorie Welish
6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe
hosted by: Ethan Plaue and Rebecca Liu
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
Curated and hosted by Ethan Plaue and Rebecca N. Liu, Time Sensitive is a reading series that explores the time-making practices of poetry, performance, and multimedia art. Poets and artists may engage themes such as crisis time, ordinary time, affecting through time, micro and macro time, shared and unshared time, the materiality of time, decolonial time, and the new times of past, present, and future — in short, artworks that express a sensitivity to time.
Marjorie Welish is the author of poetry, most recently: In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy (Coffee House, 2012) and So What So That (Coffee House, 2016). Constructed artist's books include Oaths? Questions? with James Siena (Granary Books, 2009). Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on art since 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Fellowships include: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2014-15; St. Edmond's College, Cambridge University, Visiting Fellow, 2014-15; New York Foundation for the Arts, 2007-8; Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry F ellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge University, 2005 2002; Academy of American Poets, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist, 2001; Fund for Poetry, awards: 1999 / 1989; and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship at Brown University, 1998-99. Her creative arts practice and criticism were the subjects of a day-long conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, resulting in the 300-page conference book Of the Diagram: The work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Foundation, 2003). As artist, Marjorie Welish received her first solo show thanks to Laurie Anderson, then curator of the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center; she has exhibited most recently in New York, Paris, Vienna, and Cambridge, England. She has received many grants and fellowships, including: Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, The Fifth Floor Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding (supporting an exchange between the International Studio Program, New York and the Artists’ Museum, Łódź, Poland. Collections include: Beinecke Library at Yale, Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University, Getty (library), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art; in 2010, with a Fulbright, she lectured at Edinburgh (U.K.) College of Art. In 2015 she was nominated for the award Anonymous Was a Woman.
Wednesday, 9/18
A poetry reading by Kate Colby
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
Kate Colby is author of seven books of poetry, including I Mean (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and The Arrangements (Four Way Books, 2018). A book of literary essays Dream of the Trenches, is just out with Noemi Press. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, where she was the 2017-2018 Creative Fellow. She lives in Providence and teaches in the Literary Arts department at Brown.
Thursday, 9/19
Careers in Journalism and New Media: alumni panel
Povich Journalism Program
5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
cosponsored by: The Daily Pennsylvanian and the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
Hoping to work in journalism, media, or publishing after college? Our annual Careers in Journalism and New Media alumni panel — sponsored by KWH, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize — focuses on how you can prepare for first jobs and careers in print, broadcast and online media, publishing, and related fields, as well as how to make decisions about extracurriculars, internships, and grad school in these areas.
Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. 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 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 and Communications, and lives in Washington, D.C.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico and graduated from Penn in 2017 with a major in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). At Penn, he worked for a few semesters at The Daily Pennsylvanian as a senior writer and politics reporter, covering the New Hampshire primaries in 2016 and investigating Trump's history of donating (or not donating) to the university. After graduation, he moved to New York City for a three-month internship at the New York Times metro desk. He ended up covering Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria’s devastating impact in the Caribbean, and spent more than a month reporting for theTimes in Puerto Rico. He was hired as a full-time reporter for the Times in December 2017, and covered crime, criminal justice issues and general assignments for the metro desk. He currently covers housing in New York City.
Jessica Goodman is a senior editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, where she edits stories about career, money, travel, love, and food. She and her team received a National Magazine Award for their 2017 story, How to Run for Office. Previously, she was a digital news editor at Entertainment Weekly and an entertainment editor at HuffPost. Her debut YA novel, THE PLAYERS' TABLE, will be out in 2020 from PenguinTeen.
Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author who teaches at Penn and Columbia. He is the author of six nonfiction books, including the acclaimed biographies RUSH: Revolution, Madness and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (a finalist for the 2019 George Washington Book Prize), Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West—One Meal at a Time and Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia, and co-author with Patrick Kennedy of A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Fried has been a staff writer at Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour and Philadelphia Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, author Diane Ayres.
Friday, 9/20
Saturday, 9/21
Sunday, 9/22
Monday, 9/23
LIVE at the Writers House
WXPN radio show
7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
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" is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc and is produced by Alli Katz.
Tuesday, 9/24
A poetry reading by Laura Mullen and Airea D. Matthews
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books: Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject, Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood's Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Her work has been widely anthologized, and she was the librettist for Nathan Davis' a Sound Uttered, a Silence crossed (for choir and percussion) which was commissioned by the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. She was invited to participate in the Taiwan Poetry Festival (2009) and the Dialogue between Chinese and American Poets (2018). Recent poems have been published in 1111, The Nation, Interim, Poetry, The Continental Review, and Lana Turner. Her translation of Véronique Pittolo’s Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. She is the McElveen Professor of English at LSU. Verge(an artist’s book made with the photographer John Davis O’Brien) is her most recent project.
Airea D. Matthews (C’94) is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in Best American Poets, Callaloo, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and The James Merrill House. One of Matthews's current projects includes a cross-genre book that explores politics, poverty, race and class. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and is a founding member of the Philadelphia-based Riven Collective, a multidisciplinary arts collaborative.
Wednesday, 9/25
Mess + Process: María Fernanda and Kameelah Janan Rasheed
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
watch: a video recording of this program via our YouTube channel
listen: to an audio recording of this event.
Curated by Amber Rose Johnson, Mess + Process is a conversation and workshop series that will bring together early career artists and poets to discuss the messiness of creative process and the winding (mostly nonlinear, often circular, and sometimes dead-end) paths that we take in our imaginative exploration of new ideas before they manifest as specific projects. Moving away from solely highlighting completed, public-facing works, we will turn our attention toward the active study, collaborative brainstorming, and interior wrestling that we maneuver through as creative people refusing to be stagnant, silent, or forced to color within the lines. Recognizing that creative experimentation is critical to our collective wellbeing, the conversation will focus on the dissonant and innovative possibilities that arise from our refusal of the status quo and our pursuit of new artistic horizons.
María Fernanda is an early-career poet whose poems and translations appear in Pa'lante a la luz, The Wide Shore, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. Featuring at The Brooklyn Museum, The Ecuadorian American Cultural Center, MoMaPS1, Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and more, María Fernanda has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Callaloo Writers Workshop, and VONA/Voices of Our Nation. She is the founder of Candela Writers Workshop, designed to support Black-Latinx poets through the preservation and the advancement of Black-Latinx literary work. María Fernanda is a Queerocracy (VOCAL-NY) leader advocating alongside and for the rights of LGBTQIATS homeless in New York State. She also collaborates with peer facilitators at All Together Now to strengthen supportive environments for youth in an effort to deepen bonds amongst similar-aged adoptees in the New York City metropolitan area. As a transracial adoptee, María Fernanda is a Black Ecuadorian American with adopted ethnicity branches to Louisiana and Texas. She is a Washington D.C. native.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, a former high school history teacher, is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA who is based in Brooklyn, NY. In her practice, she is invested in exploring the processes of learning/unlearning as well as the relationships between language, literacy, and power. Rasheed is interested in acts of narration as cognitive, socio-political, and spiritual gestures. Her sprawling inquiry has led her to develop work that explores experimental poetry, reference texts, intimate intertextuality, techniques of non-institutional archiving, anecdotes of religious syncretism, histories of human as well as non-human communication methods, enclosure systems, and ecological studies. Rasheed makes her inquiries visible through an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects. These projects include sprawling, xerox-based “architecturally-scaled collages” (frieze magazine, Winter 2018); interactive publications; large-scale text banner installations; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined. Rasheed has exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, ICA Philadelphia, Pinchuk Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Kitchen, among others. She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, forthcoming Fall 2019).
Thursday, 9/26
A conversation with Danny Strong
Hartman Screenwriting Symposium
6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Hosted by: Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve
RSVP REQUIRED: wh@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM
Danny Strong is a screenwriter, director, actor and producer. He wrote the screenplays for Recount, Game Change, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I and II (co-written), The Butler, and Rebel in the Rye, which he also directed. Strong is also the co-creator and executive producer of the hit FOX drama Empire and the executive producer of the TV show Proven Innocent. As an actor, Strong has been featured in a number of film, theater, and television projects, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men, Gilmore Girls, Justified, Girls and, most recently as Todd Krakow in the last three seasons of Billions. For his writing and producing Strong has won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Writers Guild Awards, an NAACP Image Award, the Producers Guild Award, a Peabody, and the Pen Award.