September 2025

Monday, 9/1/2025

Tuesday, 9/2/2025

Wednesday, 9/3/2025

ModPo Webcast, Week 1

3:00 PM in person and on YouTube

Everyone is welcome to join the people of ModPo for this live, interactive webcast — in person or online. ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.” Find more information about ModPo webcasts here.

Speakeasy Open Mic Night

Poetry, prose, and anything goes

7:00 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings and performances. A sign-up sheet will be available when you arrive and you’ll have three minutes at the podium to perform. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, your award-winning essay, or your flash fiction to share – or just come to celebrate your classmates, colleagues, and fellow writers.

Thursday, 9/4/2025

Musician George Shands and Visual Artist Queen Nancy Bell

A musical performance and gallery show opening curated by This Must Be the Place

Brodsky Gallery Opening

6:00 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Join us for a live musical performance by George Shands, who will also be dropping his brand new album, The Sea, on cassette. Stay after the music to celebrate visual artist Queen Nancy Bell and her new exhibition, I Spread Out My Hands. Brought to you by This Must Be The Place, an independent publishing company foregrounding neurodivergent Philadelphia artists.

George Shands is a Philadelphia-based electronic musician and business owner who runs the aromatherapy business, GFresh Emporium.

Queen Nancy Bell is a Philadelphia-based artist who has exhibited at Fleisher/Ollman (Philadelphia), Outsider Art Fair (NYC), and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia). She is featured in the upcoming edition of Raw Vision Magazine.

Friday, 9/5/2025

Saturday, 9/6/2025

Sunday, 9/7/2025

Monday, 9/8/2025

A Meeting of The Writers House Planning Committee

5:30 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

The Kelly Writers House is run collectively by members of its community, especially students. The Writers House Planning Committee — also known as "the Hub" — meets monthly to discuss Writers House projects and programs. Join us at this first meeting of the year to find out about some of the things we will work on this year, including our annual marathon reading, and to find out how you can get involved with community-led events and projects.

Tuesday, 9/9/2025

Two Truths and a Lie

6:00 PM in person

co-sponsored by: Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Think you can tell truth from fiction? Or do you think you can pull a fast one on your friends, classmates, and strangers? Put your name in the hat and take the stage – or just come and judge – Two Truths and a Lie at Kelly Writers House! Each round comes with a surprise theme, and the audience gets in on the action too! Whether you’re playing or guessing, come ready for laughs, surprises, and a little friendly deception. Don't forget to stay for the reception to enjoy some particularly delicious treats.

Wednesday, 9/10/2025

ModPo Webcast, Week 2

with Ariel Resnikoff

12:00 PM in person and on YouTube

A SPECIAL EPISODE OF POEMTALK: PIERRE JORIS & JEROME ROTHENBERG

6:00 PM in person

co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Hosted by Al Filreis, PoemTalk features a roundtable close reading of poetry recordings in the PennSound archive. This special episode of PoemTalk, filmed in front of an audience, will feature poems by Pierre Joris (1946–2025) and Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024), who were longtime collaborators and dear friends of the Kelly Writers House. The episode indeed will be one way for the PennSound, PoemTalk and Kelly Writers House community to express our deep admiration for the poetic achievements of these two cherished colleagues.

Thursday, 9/11/2025

A poetry reading by Therí Pickens and Yolanda Wisher

5:30 PM in person

co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program, the Department of Africana Studies, and the Department of English

hosted by: Herman Beavers

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Photo credit: Sharyn Peavy of Peavy Photography

Therí Alyce Pickens creates powerful, ground-breaking, award-winning scholarship in the fields of Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. She wrote Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press 2019), a theoretical tour-de-force which fundamentally shapes Black Disability Studies. Her editorial work ushered in new conversations about Black Disability Studies in two major journals: African American Review (2017) and College Language Association Journal (2021). Her first monograph, New Body Politics: Narrating Black and Arab Identity in the United States (Routledge 2014) brought together Arab and Black American literary and cultural production through the lenses of Black feminism and Disability Studies. In another editorial project, Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge 2018), she curates a discussion about what makes artistic production uniquely Arab American.

Professor Pickens's public writing refuses to diminish or pre-masticate the complexities of our world for a wider public. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Black Girl Nerds, The Counter, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Magazine. She is a sought-after podcast guest who brings wit, excitement, and humor to podcasts including Busy Being Black, Contemporary Black Canvas, New Books Network, The Cipher, and the MoMA Podcast.

Alongside her scholarship, Professor Pickens is a poet, whose first collection, What Had Happened Was, will debut in 2025 from Duke University Press. She is a proud alum of Margaret Porter Troupe Arts (2006), Community of Writers (2017, 2020), Kenyon Writers' Retreat (2018), Colgate Writers Workshop (2019), Bread loaf - Sicily (2019), Hurston/Wright (2023), VONA (2023), and Rutgers' University Poets and Scholars Retreat (2023). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Diode, Black Renaissance Noire, Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Langston Hughes Review, The Madison Review, and Cane: A New Critical Edition.

In addition to Professor Pickens's research, she coaches with the National Council for Faculty Development and Diversity. She also runs her own developmental editing and sensitivity reading business: Inquiry Editing, LLC.

Photo credit: Maurene Cooper

A poet, musician, educator, and curator, Yolonda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro. She was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 1999 and third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. In 2022, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow.

Wisher’s writing has been published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The New York Times, and most recently, the anthologies Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and This Is The Honey: An Anthology Of Contemporary Black Poets. Wisher’s commissioned poetry/spoken word is part of several public artworks and performances including Eight Eight Time (2025) by Kendrah Butler-Waters, Terry Klinefelter, Suzzette Ortiz, and Sumi Tonooka; Ascendance (2024) by Nina Cooke John; The Frances Suite (2022) by Ruth Naomi Floyd, and For Philadelphia (2018) by Jenny Holzer. Wisher performs and records a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters.

Wisher taught high school English for a decade, co-founded the youth-led Germantown Poetry Festival, and served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts. Wisher is an artist-in-residence in Jefferson University’s Humanities & Health program, teaching poetry to first-year medical students, staff, and patients. She is also a lead artist for Healing Verse Germantown, a poetry and public art project that engages Germantown residents in writing poetry in response to gun violence.

Wisher’s curatorial projects include Declaration House (2024), The Re-Emancipation of Social Dance (2024), Love Jawns: A Mixtape (2019), Stellar Masses (2018), Outbound Poetry Festival (2017), Yolanda Wisher’s Rent Party (2017), and City of Poetry (2016). She is the senior curator at Monument Lab, a public art, history, and design studio in Philadelphia.

Friday, 9/12/2025

Saturday, 9/13/2025

Sunday, 9/14/2025

Monday, 9/15/2025

Pregrettably Yours: On Being Influenced

A talk by Anselm Berrigan, Bagley Wright Lecture Series in Poetry

6:00 PM in person

hosted by: Simone White

rsvp: register here to attend in person

As part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in Poetry, acclaimed poet Anselm Berrigan presents Pregrettably Yours: On Being Influenced. In this three-part talk, Berrigan reflects on the forces that have shaped his poetic life: how and when he became a poet, the experience of growing up in a family of poets, and the lifelong practice of learning to listen to many voices.

Anselm Berrigan's latest book of poetry, Don’t Forget to Love Me, is out now from Wave Books. Other books include Pregrets, (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody, (Wave Books, 2018), Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He was the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail from 2008 through 2023. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). More recently, he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) with Notley, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm. A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published books by Hoa Nguyen, Steve Carey, Adam DeGraff, and Brendan Lorber. From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He teaches writing classes at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and was a longtime Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program. Berrigan was granted an Individual Artists Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in 2017, and was also awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2014. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry.

Tuesday, 9/16/2025

Should History and English Get Along?

A conversation convened by Al Filreis and William Sturkey

6:00 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

History and English are deeply intertwined. Historians produce a form of Literature, and so many novelists choose to set their stories in the past. Conversely, historians can also use literature in their quest to understand the past. And yet the disciplines remain fundamentally distinct. This discussion will examine the intersections of History and English with an eye for common ground and disagreement. Ultimately, we’ll explore the question of how History and English can better equip each other as distinct forms of the Writing Arts.

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor of English, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, Publisher of Jacket2 magazine — all at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a member of the faculty and administrator since 1985. He has published many essays on modern and contemporary American poetry, on the literary history of the 1930s and 1950s, on the literary politics of the Cold War, on the end of the lecture, and on digital humanities pedagogy. His new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry & the Promise of Digital Community, will be published in November 2025. Recent books are 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (Columbia, 2021) and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, edited with Anna Strong Safford (Pennsylvania, 2022). Among his previous books are Modernism from Right to Left, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. He produces and hosts a monthly podcast/radio program, “PoemTalk.” He has hosted three eminent writers for residencies each spring through the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program since 2000. He has won many teaching awards at Penn, was named Pennsylvania Professor of the Year in 2000 by the Carnegie Foundation, and was named one of the Top Ten Tech Innovators in Higher Education by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

William Sturkey is an associate professor of history at Penn. He teaches courses in modern American history with a focus on race in the South and the 1960s. Dr. Sturkey is the author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (2019) and the co-editor of To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools (2015). His most recent book is The Ballad of Roy Benavidez: The Life and Times of America’s Most Famous Hispanic War Hero (2024). Dr. Sturkey's public writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic.

Wednesday, 9/17/2025

A COnversation with Journalist John Harwood

12:00 PM in person

co-sponsored by: Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts and the Povich Journalism Program

hosted by: Dick Polman

rsvp: register here to attend in person

John Harwood is the respected former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He also worked the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. He currently writes an online column, The Stakes, which appears on Zeteo.com, a media company that sponsors what it calls "good ol’ fashioned adversarial journalism."

Julia Elliott and Stephanie Feldman

Bernheimer Symposium

5:30 PM in person

hosted by: Alli Katz

co-sponsored by: The Fund for Feminist Projects at the Kelly Writers House

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Julia Elliott is the author of the story collection Hellions, a TIME book of the month, the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch, and the story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice (all from Tin House). She has won a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia, a Locus Award Finalist, and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Uncharted Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She teaches fiction writing at Arcadia University and the University of Pennsylvania. Her collection The Night Parade and Other Stories is forthcoming in 2026.

ModPo Webcast, Week 3

8:30 PM in person and on YouTube

Thursday, 9/18/2025

Friday, 9/19/2025

Saturday, 9/20/2025

Sunday, 9/21/2025

Monday, 9/22/2025

Tuesday, 9/23/2025

Wednesday, 9/24/2025

ModPo Webcast, Week 4

3:00 PM in person and on YouTube

Thursday, 9/25/2025

Output: a celebration of computer-generated text

6:00 PM in person

co-sponsored by: Penn CIS, Truth and Disinformation in the Writing Arts, and the But Company event series

hosted by: Michelle Taransky

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Conversations about computer-generated text often omit the long history of work in this area, tending to focus instead on the more recent launch of ChatGPT in 2022. The anthology Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 aims to correct this omission by gathering, celebrating, and contextualizing over seven decades of English-language pieces produced by generation systems and software. Join us for presentations of computer-generated texts and other experimental outputs by anthology editors Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Monfort, along with anthology contributors Jim Carpenter, Steve McLaughlin, and Syd Zolf.

Considered an emerging leader in the field of AI writing and literature, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is co-editor of the newly released anthology Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023, published by The MIT Press and Counterpath. Bertram also recently published the AI-written chapbook A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content, winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Prize. Bertram’s most recent book of poetry is Negative Money (Soft Skull Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the New England Book Award. Their previous book, Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), won the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work, was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Their other books include Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. They are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Art grant recipient and they direct the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland College Park.

James Carpenter designed his ETC poetry generation system while a member of the affiliated faculty of the Wharton School. Submitting his system's work under the name Erica T. Carpenter, he had her poetry accepted for publication in numerous literary magazines and journals. Steve McLaughlin used ETC to generate the poems for the Issue 1 hoax, which made a lot of people mad and made others laugh. He has also published three literary novels, No Place to Pray, Nineteen to Go, and Honeyed Words and Bitter, as well as a couple of dozen short stories, including in the Chicago Tribune Printers Row, and Fiction International--all of which he wrote without digital assistance (except for half a paragraph in No Place to Pray, which he adapted from one of Erica's published pieces. Which people can't possibly hold against him because it wasn't word for word).

Steve McLaughlin is a writer and bookseller in Philadelphia. His projects include the hoax poetry anthology Issue 1 (2008, with Jim Carpenter) and the 57-volume pun collection Puniverse (2014). He currently runs Iffy Books, a bookshop/workshop space focused on DIY technology, privacy, and activism.

Nick Montfort's work includes ten computer-generated books (in print from seven presses), the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between, and more than fifty individual digital projects. His latest poetry book, All the Way for the Win, is composed entirely of three-letter words. His MIT Press books include The Future and two co-edited volumes, The New Media Reader and Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. He’s a professor at MIT, principal investigator in the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, and directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank. He lives in New York City.

Syd Zolf's most recent books are No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke UP, 2021) and a selected poetry, Social Poesis (WLU Press, 2019). Honors include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and finalist for several other prizes. Zolf’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Neutrøis, will be published by Coach House Books in early 2027. They teach at the University of Pennsylvania.

Friday, 9/26/2025

Saturday, 9/27/2025

Sunday, 9/28/2025

Monday, 9/29/2025

Live at the Writers House

A monthly radio show produced at the KWH in collaboration with WXPN

6:30 PM in person

rsvp: register here to attend in person

LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration anong the people of the Kelly Writers House and WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, we gather at the KWH to record a one-hour show of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art for broadcast by WXPN. Edited by Zach Carduner and produced by Alli Katz, LIVE at the Writers House is made possible thorugh the generous support of BigRoc.

Tuesday, 9/30/2025

Careers in Journalism and Media

Nora Magid Mentorship Prize panel

5:30 PM in person

co-sponsored by: Annenberg School for Communication, Career Services, The Creative Writing Program, The Daily Pennsylvanian, the Nora Magid Mentorship Program, and the Povich Journalism Program Fund

rsvp: register here to attend in person

Hoping to work in journalism, media, or publishing after college? Join us for a discussion of career paths, internships, grad school, and more, featuring a group of alumni journalists, writers, and editors: Luis Ferré-Sadurní (C’17), Matt Flegenheimer (C’11), Beatrice Forman (C’22), Stephen Fried (C’79), Ashley Parker (C’05), and Isabella Simonetti (C’21), with host Jessica Goodman (C’12). The conversation, organized and hosted by the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize Advisory Committee, will focus on how you might prepare for first jobs and careers in print, broadcast and online media, publishing, and related fields. For more info about the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize and a full list of winners, visit the Nora Magid Mentorship Prize.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní (C'17) is an immigration reporter at the New York Times. He joined the Times in 2017 and has covered breaking news, crime, housing, and politics for the Metro Desk. He previously covered New York State government and politics for four years, covering former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Gov. Kathy Hochul as Albany Bureau Chief. He began covering immigration issues in the New York City area in late 2023, with a focus on the city's migrant crisis and the Trump administration's enforcement efforts.

Matt Flegenheimer (C'11) is a correspondent at the New York Times. His primary focus is long-form profiles of notable figures — in politics and otherwise — for the Times and Times Magazine. Since joining the paper in 2011, he has covered two presidential campaigns, the Trump era in Washington, New York City transportation, and City Hall.

Beatrice Forman (C'22) is a breaking news reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and a co-author of Taylor Swift (Spotlight on a Legend), an Amazon-bestselling retrospective on the pop star published in 2024 by Hearst. At the Inquirer, Beatrice specializes in coverage of Philly's distinct pop and youth cultures. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022, where she was editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine and the diversity chair of the Daily Pennsylvanian. Beatrice has reported on memes for Vox and Cosmo and was previously a deputy editor for Billy Penn at WHYY. In her spare time, Beatrice serves as an at-large director for the Society of Professional Journalists.

Stephen Fried (C'79) is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who teaches at Penn and Columbia

Ashley Parker (C'05) is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, Parker — a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner —spent eight years at the Washington Post, where she covered all four years of Donald Trump’s first presidency, was White House bureau chief during President Joe Biden’s first two years, and covered the 2024 presidential campaign as the senior national political correspondent. Before that, she spent more than a decade at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress. She is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.

Isabella Simonetti (C'21) is a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal in New York where she covers the media industry broadly, spanning sports rights, new media, cable TV and publishing. Before, she served as the David Carr Fellow in Business Reporting at the New York Times. Isabella graduated from Penn in 2021. As a student, she was the president of the Daily Pennsylvanian.

Moderator Jessica Goodman (C'12) is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of young adult thrillers They Wish They Were Us, They’ll Never Catch Us, The Counselors, The Legacies, and The Meadowbrook Murders from Penguin Random House. Her books have been translated into 15 languages. She is co-developing They’ll Never Catch Us for television at Netflix. She is the former op-ed editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, where she won a National Magazine Award in personal service. She has also held editorial positions at Entertainment Weekly and HuffPost, and her work has been published in outlets like The Cut, Elle, Glamour, and Marie Claire. Jessica graduated from the College in 2012.