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October 2010

Friday, 10/1

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

Saturday, 10/2

A celebration of CAConrad and The Book of Frank

Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series

2:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

listen to a recording of this event on PennSound's CAConrad author page
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Install the Flash plugin to watch this video.

The Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series is put on by Committee of Vigilance members Michelle Taransky and Emily Pettit. The Committee of Vigilance is a subdivision of Sleepy Lemur Quality Enterprises, which is the production division of The Meeteetzee Institute.

CAConrad is the recipient of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award for The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). He is a co-founder of PACE (Poet Activist Community Extension). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. Visit him online at http://caconrad.blogspot.com or with his friends at http://phillysound.blogspot.com.


Sunday, 10/3

Monday, 10/4

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

Tuesday, 10/5

A Poetry Reading by Raquel Albarrán and Carlos Soto Román

presented by the Emergency Poetry 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 at PennSound

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 Emergency addresses North American poetic practice as it is centered around close-knit communities, long-distance mentorships, new media, and chapbook exchange, asking how theoretical stances and aesthetic practices are transmitted among poets at different stages in their careers. The series was launched in 2006 with support from the Kerry Sherin Wright Prize for programming at Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, an award designed to support a project that demonstrates aesthetic capaciousness and literary communitarianism. All readings are held at the Writers House and are available online at PennSound.

Raquel Albarrán (San Juan, 1983) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her poetry and prose has appeared in several Puerto Rican literary journals, including Derivas, a collective literary blog for emergent Puerto Rican writers that she also co-founded in 2006. Her first poetry collection, La intimidad de los extraños (Stranger Intimacy) is expected to be published in Mexico City.

Carlos Soto Román was born in Valparaíso, Chile. He has published the books La Marcha de los Quiltros (The Mongrel's March, 1999), Haiku Minero (Miner Haiku, 2007) and Cambio y Fuera (Over and Out, 2009). He has resided in Philadelphia since March 2009, is a member of The New Philadelphia Poets and the editor of the new cooperative anthology of U.S. poetry, Elective Affinities. He is also a pharmacist and actually is pursuing a Master in Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.


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

Wednesday, 10/6

A reading by Swedish poets Jorgen Gassilewski and Anna Hallberg

presented by Writers Without Borders

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Charles Bernstein
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to audio recordings of Jorgen Gassilewski's reading and conversation of this event at PennSound
listen: to audio recordings of Anna Hallberg's reading and conversation of this event at PennSound

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Jorgen Gassilewski (born in 1961) is a Swedish writer, translator, cultural journalist and critic. His literary debut was the collection of poetry Du ("You", 1987). All in all he has published nine books, most recently the novel Goteborgshandelserna ("The Gothenburg Events", 2006). Next February a new book of poetry with the classic title Karleksdikter ("Love Poems") will appear. His poetry has been translated into Mandarin, Russian, French, English, Spanish, Polish, Hindi, Danish, Norwegian and German.

Anna Hallberg (born in 1975) is a Swedish poet and critic. Her first book was the collection of poetry Friktion ("Friction", 2001). Three years later it was followed by pa era platser ("on your marks", 2004), and she has been nominated for The Nordic Council's Literature Prize and other awards. This spring her third volume Mil ("Mile", 2008) was published. Hallberg also works with visual poetry, and has had several exhibitions at Nordic galleries. She writes literary criticism for the largest Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, and regularly publishes essays and articles in literary magazines.


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

Thursday, 10/7

A lunch talk by Rubén Gallo

12:00 PM

hosted by: Kenneth Goldsmith
rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

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Rubén Gallo is an award-winning writer and scholar. He is the author of Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (2005), an essay about machines and modern culture in early twentieth century Mexico. He has also published two books about Mexico City's urban art and visual culture: New Tendencies in Mexican Art (2004) and The Mexico City Reader (2004). He is currently at work on a new book: Freud in Mexico: The Neuroses of Modernity. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.


A reading by nonfiction writer Sam Apple

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Max Apple
co-sponsored by: Creative Writing
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

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Sam Apple's literary achievements range from publications like his Schlepping Through the Alps (2005, Random House), which was a finalist for the PEN America Award, to receiving the 2005 Faux-Faulkner award. Currently the publisher and editor of The Faster Times, Apple was also the editor-in-chief of New Voices Magazine and Director of Interactive Media at Nerve.com.. His writing has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine and Slate. In 2009, he published his second work, American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland (Random House).


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

Friday, 10/8

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

Saturday, 10/9

Sunday, 10/10

Monday, 10/11

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

Tuesday, 10/12

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

Wednesday, 10/13

A lunch program with Eileen Myles on "Inferno"

presented by Feminism/s

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

RSVP: to wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM
listen to a recording of this event on PennSound's Eileen Myles author page
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Install the Flash plugin to watch this video.

Eileen Myles was born in Boston in 1949, attended Catholic schools in Arlington, Mass. and graduated from UMass (Boston) in 1971. She came to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Since then she's become widely known in writing circles, art circles, queer circles and beyond as one of the most restless interpreters of the American vernacular, moving fluidly from the poetry to writing novels, essays and plays, art reviews, performances and libretti, and perhaps most notably as someone "with an uncanny knack" as John Ashbery put it, "for making people feel uncomfortable and awake... chanting softly and beautifully the harsh if humorous realities that combine to make whatever life a poet can piece together today." Myles' collection of essays The Importance of Being Iceland, for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant is just out from Semiotext(e)/MIT. Eileen also writes novels (Chelsea Girls, Cool for You) and libretti ("Hell") and many many poems (Sorry, Tree, Not Me). She ran St. Mark's Poetry Project in the 80s. In 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President. She's a Professor Emeritus of Writing & Literature at UC San Diego. She lives in New York.


Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Install the Flash plugin to watch this video.

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


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

Thursday, 10/14

a conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin

Weber Symposium

6:30 in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: Wharton
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Established by Stacey (W'85) and Jeff Weber, the annual Weber Symposium trives to emphasize the importance of clarity in writing about finance and economics by featuring guest speakers whose work reflects this commitment to lucid prose.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a Gerald Loeb Award-winning American journalist and author. He is a financial columnist for The New York Times and is the newspaper's chief mergers and acquisitions reporter. He is also the founder and editor of DealBook, a financial news service, published by The New York Times. Sorkin has appeared on NBC's Today show, Charlie Rose on PBS, PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, MSNBC's Hardball and Morning Joe, ABC's Good Morning America, The Chris Matthews Show, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, the BBC World Service, Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and is a frequent guest host of CNBC's Squawk Box. Sorkin's book on the Wall Street banking crisis, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves, was published by Viking October 20, 2009. It won the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for best business book of the year, was on the shortlist for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and was on The New York Times Best Seller list for six months.

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

Friday, 10/15

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

Saturday, 10/16

Sunday, 10/17


Monday, 10/18

A meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (the "Hub")

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

RSVP: to 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. Go here to get a sense of what we do; go here for sound clips and photos from our end-of-year party; go here for a list of campus publications.

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

Tuesday, 10/19

A reading by Richard Burgin

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Greg Djanikian
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

Richard Burgin is a fiction writer, editor, and critic. He is the author of twelve books, including the story collections Fear of Blue Skies, The Spirit Returns, Private Fame, Man Without Memory (each of which was listed by The Philadelphia Inquireras one of the Notable Books of the Year), the novel Ghost Quartet, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (translated thus far into four foreign languages), and Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (published to date in seven foreign editions). He has won five Pushcart Prizes for his stories and had ten others listed in the Pushcart Prize Anthology as among the year's best stories. He is the founder and editor of the internationally distributed literary journal Boulevard (now published by Saint Louis University), which has won numerous national grants, awards and honors in its 18 years of existence. His criticism has been published in literary journals such as Partisan Review, Boston Review, and Chicago Review and his book reviews have been published frequently in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post, among other newspapers. His book The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories was chosen as one of the Best Books of 2006 by The Times Literary Supplement.


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

Wednesday, 10/20

A lunch talk with Rebecca Traister

Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: wh@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Rebecca Traister is the author of Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women (Free Press) and a senior writer at Salon.com, where she has covered women in politics, media and entertainment for seven years. She has also a contributor to Elle, and has written for The New York Observer, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Vogue, New York, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.


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

Thursday, 10/21

An evening with Make/Shift Magazine

presented by Feminism/s

featuring Jessica Hoffman, Hilary Goldberg, and local guests

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

Make/shift magazine creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art. Made by an editorial collective committed to antiracist, transnational, and queer perspectives, make/shift embraces the multiple and shifting identities of feminist communities. We know there's exciting work being done in various spaces and forms by people seriously and playfully resisting and creating alternatives to systematic oppression. Make/shift exists to represent, participate in, critique, provoke, and inspire more of that good work.

Jessica Hoffmann is a freelance writer/editor and activist. She has contributed to numerous publications, including ColorLines, AlterNet, and the anthologies We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. She blogs at The Bilerico Project and is active in local and national organizing around food, housing, and more. In 2008, Utne named her one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.


Hilary Goldberg's films and music videos—including in the Spotlight, Beyond Lovely, Transliminal Criminal, and Katastrophe's Big Deal—have been screened in venues around the world, from the American Cinematheque in Hollywood to the Women Make Waves Festival in Taiwan. Goldberg is also a poet, writer, and spoken-word performer who has performed at the RADAR reading series, the California African American Museum, the Bumbershoot Festival, the Hopland Women's Music Festival, Reed College, and Oregon Country Fair, among other venues.

Goldberg has been a recipient of a Panavision New Filmmaker Grant and a POWER UP filmmaker grant. Her work has been profiled or reviewed in Bitch, Curve, Girlfriends, and other publications.


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

Friday, 10/22

Arts Crawl Lunch Talk: A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses

featuring author Anne Trubek

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: Penn Press
RSVP to: wh@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 573-9748
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event

Why do we visit writers' houses? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation, including the onetime homes of Hemingway, Whitman, Alcott, Poe, and London. Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

Anne Trubek's writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, American Prospect, and Salon.com. She is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and English at Oberlin College.

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

Saturday, 10/23

Sunday, 10/24

Monday, 10/25

LIVE at the Writers House

Philly Bites! Food Writers Read

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

listen: to an audio recording of this event

LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the Kelly Writers House and WXPN FM (88.5). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc. For more information, contact Producer Erin Gautsche (gautsche@writing.upenn.edu).


Kirsten Henri
Drew Lazor
Felicia D'Ambrosio

After graduating with a B.F.A. in film and television production from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Kirsten Henri spent the next several years working in the front of the house at several of New York's leading restaurants. She returned to her native Philadelphia in 2003 and started her career in food writing, as a columnist and later as restaurant reviewer for Philadelphia Weekly, before moving on to work with restaurant website Foobooz. In 2007, she was awarded a scholarship for "Food Writing Passion" by legendary cookbook author James Peterson, which makes her feel guilty since she doesn't cook at home all that much. Most recently, she was the editor of the Philadelphia edition of New York magazine's food blog, Grub Street. There's nothing she won't eat or drink, although she's not a big fan of scallops.

Brian Freedman is a food and wine writer, wine educator, and food and wine consultant. He is a contributing writer for John Mariani's Virtual Gourmet, contributing food and drinks writer for Philadelphia Style Magazine, contributing writer for Where Magazine and the annual GuestBook, wine columnist for Affluent Magazine, contributing writer for Sommelier India, and wine specialist and resident blogger, at www.UncorkLife.com, for Wine Chateau, one of the largest online wine retailers in the world. He is also currently the restaurant critic and drinks columnist for Philadelphia Weekly, Suburban Life Magazine, and South Jersey Magazine.

As a reporter, Drew Lazor has covered hard news, sports, education and arts. But he hit on a true passion when he began writing about food for the Philadelphia City Paper as a college intern in 2005. Since then, Lazor has parlayed an arbitrary assignment – a food news beat column called Feeding Frenzy – into a fulltime position overseeing all the dining content that appears in CP. (He's also the paper's Web editor.) He launched Meal Ticket, City Paper's food blog, in October 2008.

While most of his work these days deals in all things edible, you can occasionally catch Lazor writing about movies, music and the Internet for CP and a handful of other publications.

Lazor has served as a judge at numerous culinary contests, including: the Headhouse Market Iron Chef Competition, Food Network's "Throwdown with Bobby Flay", ScrappleFest 2009 at Reading Terminal Market, the South Philly Chili Cookoff, Philly Cooks! 2010, and the Philly Mag Cocktail Competition.

Felicia D'Ambrosio is the Community and Marketing Manager for Yelp.com in Philadelphia. She spent the last three years writing the food beat for City Paper, as well as blogging daily at City Paper's food and drinks blog Meal Ticket.

Monk's Cafe, Village Whiskey and Capogiro Gelato all figure into her resume, and she feels equally at home expediting, pouring drinks or bouncing troublemaking trolls out into the street (digital or flesh-and-blood). You'll find her planning remarkable monthly events for her Yelp Elites, spreading the word about Yelp to Philadelphians and connecting with the community both online and in the real world.

Drawing on the deep well of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Folk, and Country, John Francis conjures the spirits of his eloquent brand of songwriting. His live shows range in dynamism from pin-drop intimacy to all the spitfire of a raucous chicken-wire barroom and a big-tent revival all rolled up in one.

John Francis has just finished his 2nd full-length record, The Better Angels. Produced by, John Carter Cash, in the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, TN. There, Johnny and June recorded much of their last several masterpieces. The Better Angels spans the landscape of the human heart, and the heart of America. Much like the title, taken from a line of Lincoln’ s inaugural speech, these songs are rooted in rich American soil. The characters and themes are fiction and nonfiction, lovers and the lovesick, rebels and wanderers, patriots and fallen soldiers, saints and drunkards, the beautiful and the broken, but each profoundly real and human. Plumbing the ‘ heart of the heartland’ , Francis keeps the folk/country tradition of storytelling alive, but charges it with a new bolt of lightning. It’ s the kind of lightning that strikes so rarely in this cookie-cutter, "guy with guitar" era. Potent and prophetic, the songs on The Better Angels...like Francis' otherworldly voice... simply can not be denied.

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

Tuesday, 10/26

A poetry reading by Burt Kimmelman

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Al Filreis
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event at PennSound

Burt Kimmelman has published six collections of poetry – As If Free (Talisman House, Publishers, 2009), There Are Words (Dos Madres Press, 2007), Somehow (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (Jensen/Daniels Publishing, 2000), and Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (Peter Lang Publishing, 1996; paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (Facts on File, 2005) and co- edited The Facts on File Companion to American Poetry (Facts on File, 2007). He has published scores of essays on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry.


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

Wednesday, 10/27

A Lunch Discussion with Will Bunch

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Will Bunch is author of the soon-to-be-published The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama -- an in-depth look at the rise of the New Right, including the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, the Oath Keepers, and radical extremists in Congress. The book, published by HarperCollins on Aug. 31, 2010, is based on extensive interviews and travels from the hot spots of Arizona to Beck's American Revival to Kentucky's Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot.

Will is also author of 2009's Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. He is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog, Attytood, and a senior fellow for Media Matters for America.

He has won numerous journalism awards, including a share of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting when he worked for New York Newsday. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, American Prospect, American Journalism Review and elsewhere, and he is author of one other book: Jukebox America: Down Back Streets and Blue Highways in Search of the Country's Greatest Jukebox.


A talk by Arthur I. Miller

Einstein/Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Creates Havoc

3:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: the Critical Writing Program
RSVP: wh@writing.upenn.edu

Arthur I. Miller is an author, science historian and Professor Emeritus at University College London. His most recent book is Einstein/Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Creates Havocxxxxxxxx. Miller who has his Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. and taught at Harvard, says he was always fascinated by "the nature of things", which lead him into the history of science. He created the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London.

Through studying creativity in science Miller realized the essential role played by visual imagery which led him into exploring the nature of creative thinking in art and science. His work as a scientist, writer and historian explores the interrelations between intuition, aesthetics, visual imagery and representation as scientists and artists attempt to 'read' nature.

Other books by Miller include: Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art; Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung; Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes; and Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity: Emergence (1905) and Early Interpretation (1905-1911).

Einstein/Picasso, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is the centerpiece of the Critical Writing Course at Penn taught by Senior Fellow Jo Ann Caplin.


Spookeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

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


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

Thursday, 10/28

RealArts@Penn Presents a lunch program with Ben Sisario

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Ben Sisario is a reporter and popular music critic at the New York Times. He is the author of Doolittle, a book at the Pixies' album of the same name. He also does on-air music reviews for WFUV-FM, and writes the blog "Crimes Against Music."

A Poetry Reading by Melissa Stein and David Moolten

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Foundation, and her work has won awards from Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.


David Moolten is a poet and a filmmaker as well as a physician specializing in transfusion medicine. His most recent book, Primitive Mood, won the T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press and was published in the fall of 2009. He is also the author of two previous books, Plums & Ashes (Northeastern University, 1994), which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and Especially Then (David Robert Books, 2005). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southwest Review, and Epoch, among other journals and reviews. His work has been widely anthologized and his honors include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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

Friday, 10/29

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

Saturday, 10/30

KWH 15th Anniversary Open House

2:00 PM to 4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: whhomecoming@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM

Help us celebrate our 15th year! Renew your acquaintance or get to know this lively and innovative home for writers of all ages and genres as you join members of the Writers House community for informal conversation, coffee, and light refreshments.

KWH 15th Anniversary Celebration

a reading by former students of Al Filreis

Suzanne Maynard Miller, Alicia Oltuski, Eric Umansky, & Kerry Sherin Wright

4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: whhomecoming@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event
Al Filreis (15:30): MP3
Eric Umansky (8:18): MP3
Alicia Oltuski (14:13): MP3
Kerry Sherin Wright (13:57): MP3
Suzanne Maynard (21:44): MP3


Suzanne Maynard Miller
Alicia Oltuski
Eric Umansky
Kerry Sherin Wright

Suzanne Maynard Miller (C'89) is a playwright and teacher. Her plays include Young Love, Flirting With the Deep End (Dramatic Publishing, 2007); Beatrice; The Handwriting, the Soup, and the Hats; and Abigail's Atlas. Her work has been produced in Los Angeles, Seattle, Providence, New Haven and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Maynard Miller has taught playwriting and expository writing at Brown University and at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been an artist-in-residence at public schools in Seattle, Providence, Brooklyn, and the Bronx and a playwright-in-residence at Annex Theater in Seattle, where she was a company member from 1989-1996. Maynard Miller has also led playwriting workshops for incarcerated women and was a founding member of Kidswrite, a Seattle-based literacy program for fifth graders. Currently, she teaches in the English Department at the New York City College of Technology/CUNY. A graduate of Penn, Maynard Miller received her MFA in playwriting from Brown University in 1998. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

Install the Flash plugin to watch this video.

Alicia Oltuski (C'06, G'06) is a writer whose book about diamonds is forthcoming from Scribner. She concentrated in creative writing at Penn and spent many happy hours at the Kelly Writers House. After graduating, she completed an MFA at Columbia and taught at the University of the Arts. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, newspapers, and on the radio. She lives with her husband Uri Pasternak, a 2004 graduate of Penn Engineering.

Eric Umansky is a senior editor at the non-profit investigative newsroom, ProPublica. This year, ProPublica became for the first online-only news organization to win a Pulitzer Prize. Previously, Umansky was a columnist for Slate. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Umansky is also the co-founder of DocumentCloud, a new non-profit that's building tools to improve how documents are shown and shared online. Earlier in his career, Umansky was editor of MotherJones.com.

Kerry Sherin Wright is the founding Director of the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House at Franklin & Marshall College and Executive Director of Poetry Paths, a poetry and public art project in Lancaster, PA. She is also an adjunct assistant professor in the English department at Franklin & Marshall, where she teaches courses in creative writing, contemporary experimental fiction, and graphic literature. Before joining Franklin & Marshall in 2003, Wright served for six years as the first Director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Wright was recognized upon her departure from the Kelly Writers House at Penn with the creation of The Kerry Sherin Wright Prize, an annual award that supports an event or project that "best captures" her spirit of "aesthetic capaciousness and literary communitarianism." She has a PhD in English literature from Temple University, and she received her Masters in creative writing from Hollins College and her Bachelors in religious studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Wright serves on the boards of the James Street Improvement District and the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design’s Public Art Advisory Committee. She is a writer of both scholarly and creative prose and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Lancaster with her husband Scott Wright and their son Skyler.

Sunday, 10/31