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November 2010

Monday, 11/1

A reading by novelist Joseph Skibell

The Wexler Family Endowed Fund for Programs in Jewish Life and Culture

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Join us for the inaugural event in a new programming series supported by the Wexler Family Endowed Fund for Programs in Jewish Life and Culture at the Kelly Writers House. The Wexler Family Fund will support all kinds of programs related to Jewish life and culture.

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Joseph Skibell's debut novel, A Blessing on the Moon, received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Book of the Month Club selection, the novel was named one of the year's best books by Publishers Weekly, Le Monde and Amazon.com, and has been translated into half a dozen languages. The novel is currently being adapted into an opera. His second novel, The English Disease, received the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. A Curable Romantic, his third novel, will be published in October 2010. A recipient of a Halls Fiction Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Skibell is a professor at Emory University and the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.


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Tuesday, 11/2

An Evening with Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

2010-2011 ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residence

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

Come meet this year's ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residence, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. A popular New York City slam poet, Cristin will be performing both solo and multi-voice poems (with special guests!). Cristin will also be providing sparkling apple cider and her own home-made (and award-winning!) Pumpkin Chili, for the bravest and the hungriest audience members. Copies of her latest books will be available for sale, and Cristin will sign books & answer questions after the reading.

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Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is the author of five books of poetry: Dear Future Boyfriend, Hot Teen Slut, Working Class Represent, Oh, Terrible Youth and Everything is Everything. She is also the author of the non-fiction book, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, which The Washington Post named as one of five Notable Books on Exploring Poetry in 2008. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Cristin moved to New York City at the age of 17. At age 19, she founded the three-time National Poetry Slam championship poetry series NYC-Urbana, which is still held weekly at the NYC's famed Bowery Poetry Club. Her work has been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendancies, Rattle, Barrelhouse, decomP, kill author, Conduit and La Petite Zine, among others. She has lectured and performed throughout the U.S. and Australia, including the Sydney Opera House in Australia (2003), Joe's Pub in New York City (2002), the Largo Theatre in Los Angeles (2010) and over 100 universities and colleges. Cristin is using her ArtsEdge residency to write a book on the life and times of Thomas Dent Mutter, founder of Philadelphia's (in)famous Mutter Museum, and will be teaching a course on non-fiction poetry and prose in the Spring semester. For more information, please visit her website at: www.aptowicz.com.


Check out Cristin's work:


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Wednesday, 11/3

A poetry reading by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

presented by Writers Without Borders

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Kevin Platt and Charles Bernstein
co-sponsored by: Slavic Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literatures, and Temple-Penn Poetics
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to audio recordings of reading and conversation of this event at PennSound

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Born in Potsdam, Germany, Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko spent his youth in the Ukraine of the Soviet Union. While working on his eight book-length collections of poetry and two full-length plays, he also worked as a stoker at the former Leningrad State University Psychological Department. His first book was Nebo Sootvetstvii (Sky of Correspondence), published in 1990. The same year a collection in English, Description, translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova was published by Sun & Moon Press in the USA. Xenia followed in 1994, published the same year in English, again by Sun & Moon Press. Other books of poetry, followed, Pod Podozreniem (Under Suspicion), and his selected poetry, Opisanie in 2000. Dragomoshchenko has also published several books of fiction and prose, including Phosphor, Kitajskoe Solnce, translated into English as Chinese Sun (Ugly Duckling Press), and Bezrazlichia (Indifferences), a book of collected prose. Dalkey Archive Press published a selection of Dragomoshchenko's prose as Dust in 2009. Dragomoshchenko's work has been collected into several anthologies and he has lectured in the Department of Philosophy at the St. Petersburg State University and been a visiting Professor at the University of California, San Diego, SUNY Buffalo, and the Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, an affiliate of Bard College.

"For Dragomoshchenko, language is not the always already used and appropriated, the pre-formed and prefixed that American poets feel they must wrestle with. On the contrary, Dragomoshchenko insists that 'language cannot be appropriated because it is perpetually incomplete' ...and, in an aphorism reminiscent of Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre,' "poetry is always somewhere else." —Marjorie Perloff

For more information about Dragomoshchenko and his work, visit these links:


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Thursday, 11/4

A lunch talk with Rick Prelinger

"Appropriation: Over and Out?"

11:45 in the Arts Cafe

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

Rick Prelinger's talk examines how massive cultural freeganism is colliding with the urgency of the archival impulse, and proposes several largely unpursued directions in which people might work with preexisting materials.

Rick Prelinger is founder of Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years operation. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. He sits on the National Film Preservation Board as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is board president of the Internet Archive. He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library.


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Friday, 11/5

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Saturday, 11/6

Sunday, 11/7

Monday, 11/8

A Lunch Program with Buzz Bissinger

presented by the Sylvia Kauders lunch series

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

introduced by: Dick Polman
rsvp to: 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

H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger is among the nation's most honored and distinguished writers. A native of New York City, Buzz is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award and the National Headliners Award, among others. He also was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of three highly acclaimed nonfiction books: Friday Night Lights, A Prayer for the City and Three Nights in August.

Buzz has been a reporter for some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers; a magazine writer with published work in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated; and a co-producer and writer for the ABC television drama NYPD Blue. Two of his works were made into the critically acclaimed films Friday Night Lights and Shattered Glass; three more are in active development. Friday Night Lights also serves as the inspiration for the television series of the same name, which will begin its third season on NBC.

Buzz graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1972 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. His journalism career began at the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Va. He then moved to The St. Paul Pioneer Press and later The Philadelphia Inquirer. It was at the Inquirer in 1987 that he and two colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting a six-part investigative series on the Philadelphia Court System.

In 1988, Buzz left the Inquirer and moved to Odessa, Texas to write Friday Night Lights, a book about the impact of high school football on small-town life. The New York Times number one bestseller, published in 1990, has sold roughly two million copies and is still in print.

Buzz worked as an investigative journalist for The Chicago Tribune from 1990 to 1992. In 1992, he returned to Philadelphia to begin work on A Prayer for the City. Granted unprecedented access by then-Mayor Edward G. Rendell, Buzz's book, five-and-a-half years in the making, garnered critical acclaim nationwide and was hailed as a classic on politics and urban America.

Three Nights in August, about major league baseball and the timeless beauty of the game through the eyes of its most innovative manager, St. Louis Cardinals skipper Tony La Russa, was published in April 2005 by Houghton-Mifflin. It spent four-and-a-half months on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been hailed as one of the finest books on baseball in the past decade. The paperback edition of the book was released in April of 2006. A film version of Three Nights in August is in development. His latest book, Shooting Stars, written with NBA basketball great LeBron James, will be published this September.

Buzz has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine since 1996. His August 2007 Vanity Fair article "Gone Like the Wind," about the saga of 2006 Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, was optioned by Universal Pictures for a film to be directed by Pete Berg, who also directed the film adaptation of Friday Night Lights.

Bissinger is now in the process of completing a book about his twin sons. Born 13 weeks premature in 1983 and weighing less than two pounds, they have lived diametrically opposed lives. After obtaining his master's in education from the University of Pennsylvania, Gerry is now a public school teacher while Zach, because of oxygen deprivation at birth, suffered trace brain damage and struggles every day with enormous learning disabilities. The book, entitled Father's Day, will also be published by Penguin Press.

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

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.

New and old Hub members alike are welcome to join us for pizza and a discussion of upcoming readings and programs, volunteer opportunities, and updates from project leaders. Anyone is welcome to join the Writers House Planning Committee. At this first meeting of the year we will discuss ways you can get involved at Writers House.

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.

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Tuesday, 11/9

A reading by novelist Chimamanda Adichie

presented by: Writers Without Borders

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is set before and during the Biafran War. Her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck, was published in 2009. In 2010, Adichie was featured in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Fiction Issue. Her story, "Birdsong," appeared in the September 20, 2010, issue. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.


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Wednesday, 11/10

Speakeasy: 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!

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Thursday, 11/11

Bernheimer Symposium: Judy Wicks

a local lunch conversation about food, politics, and activism

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Established in the memory of Comparative Literature teacher and scholar Charles Bernheimer by Writers House Advisory Board member Kate Levin (GAS'96), the Bernheimer Symposium is organized each year by the Writers House Program Coordinator, who takes the opportunity to think expansively about programming possibilities.

Judy Wicks is owner and founder of Philadelphia's 25-year-old White Dog Cafe, and is a national leader in the local, living economies movement. She is co-founder of the nationwide Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN). She is also president of White Dog Community Enterprises, a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region.

Judy has won numerous awards, including the James Beard Foundation's Humanitarian of the Year in 2005, and the Philadelphia Sustainability Awards Life Time Achievement in 2007. Other accolades include Oprah Magazine's "5 Amazingly Gifted and Giving Food Professionals," and Inc. Magazine's 25 favorite entrepreneurs. Judy co-authored The White Dog Cafe Cookbook: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia's Revolutionary Restaurant, and is currently working on a book about her business and the local living economy movement to be published by Chelsea Green.

With a four-part mission of serving customers, community, employees, and the natural environment, the White Dog Cafe has created numerous educational and community-building programs which focus on topics such as economic & social justice, environmental protection, peace & non-violence, drug policy reform and community arts. Through "Table for Six Billion, Please!" the international "sister restaurant" project Judy began in 1986, she has organized trips to Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Vietnam, and Israel / Palestine in order to understand the effects of US policy. A local sister restaurant program promotes minority-owned restaurants in Philadelphia and Camden. In 1992, Judy began the White Dog mentoring program, which introduces inner-city high school students to the restaurant business through internships at the Cafe. Her adjacent gift store, the Black Cat, founded in 1989, features local and fair trade crafts. White Dog Enterprises, which includes White Dog Cafe and Black Cat, employs over 100 people and grosses approximately $5 million annually, demonstrating the concept of "doing well by doing good."

The Cafe sources all produce in season from local organic family farms. All meat and poultry is humanely raised, and fish and seafood are sourced from sustainable fisheries. One hundred percent of electricity is purchased from wind power sources, the first business in Pennsylvania to do so. Entry-level employees make a minimum "living wage" of $9/hour. Twenty percent of profits are contributed to White Dog Community Enterprises and other non-profits. Community Enterprise projects have included Fair Food, which connects local family farms with urban markets, and SBN, which was spun off in 2006.

Judy has appeared on Nightline, MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and numerous local TV and radio shows. She and the Cafe have been featured in Oprah Magazine, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Fortune Small Business, Washington Post, Whole Earth Magazine, Utne Reader, Yes Magazine, Fast Company, Healthy Living Magazine, Business Ethics Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Chronicle of Higher Education, Resurgence Magazine, Hope Magazine, Sojourner Magazine, In Business, Orion Magazine, The Other Side, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine and the Philadelphia Business Journal. Judy's business career is featured in several books including Making a Life, Making a Living: Reclaiming Your Purpose and Passion in Business and Life by Mark Albion, Good News for a Chance: How Everyday People Are Helping the Planet by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, and Aiming Higher: 25 Stories of How Companies Prosper by Combining Sound Management and Social Vision by David Bollier.

Judy was co-founder of the Free People's Store, now called Urban Outfitters, in 1970, and general manager and co-proprietor of Restaurant LaTerrasse from 1974 to 1984.

She was also co-founder and President of Synapse, Inc. a non-profit publishing company, and editor and art director of its publications, the Whole City Catalog in 1972 and 1974, and the Philadelphia Resource Guide in 1982.

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Friday, 11/12

POETRY READING FEATURING KEVIN VARRONE, CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING, AND CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ with Tyler Antoine

presented by the Whenever We Feel Like It series

4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

listen: to an audio recording of this event at PennSound

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.



Kevin Varrone
Cynthia Arrieu-King
Craig Santos Perez
Tyler Antoine

Kevin Varrone's most recent collection, g-point almanac: passyunk lost, is just out from Ugly Duckling Presse, as is a companion chapbook, The Philadelphia Improvements. His previous collection, g-point almanac: id est, was published by Instance Press in 2008. Individual poems are available electronically at Duration Press, in Big Bridge, Cross Connect, and [out of nowhere]. He lives in South Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her book People are Tiny in Paintings of China is forthcoming from Octopus Books in the fall of 2010. Her work and reviews will appear this year in Boston Review, Witness, Jacket, etc. She lives near a bunch of casinos and the sea.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry collections: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010).

Tyler Antoine, 21, is currently a senior English major at Temple University, intending to graduate this spring. Born and raised in southern Delaware, he greatly anticipates the Rapture.


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Saturday, 11/13

Sunday, 11/14


Monday, 11/15

A talk by Howard Fineman

Election '10: Did the (New) Media Help or Harm American Democracy?

introduced by Dick Polman

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

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

Howard Fineman is a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC and is the senior political editor of The Huffington Post. Called "one of the more recognizable pundits on cable television" by The New York Times, Fineman is a regular guest on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Fineman also appears on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," NBC's "Today Show" and the weekend syndicated "Chris Matthews Show." He joined The Huffington Post, one of the nation's most popular web sites in October 2010 after many years as a reporter, columnist, editor and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief at Newsweek Magazine. The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, Fineman's work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic. He has interviewed every major presidential candidate since 1984; business leaders such as Bill Gates, Steve Case, Steve Ballmer, Robert Rubin and Ted Turner ;and entertainment personalities such as Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Aaron Sorkin and Jay Leno. Although Fineman now reports on TV exclusively for NBC, he has appeared on most major public affairs shows, including: Nightline, Face the Nation, Larry King Live, Fox News Sunday, Charlie Rose, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. His 2008 book, The Thirteen American Arguments, became a national best seller and was published in paperback by Random House in 2009.


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Tuesday, 11/16

Susan Bee: A Retrospective

Brodsky Gallery Opening – with a talk by the artist

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

co-sponsored by: Femininsm/s and the Wexler Family Fund
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV

Susan Bee is an artist, editor and designer who works and lives in New York City. Her work examines and questions intersections of identity, gender roles and secular Jewish culture. As an artist, she believes strongly in the role of the imagination and the importance of poetry, humor, irony, memory, and fantasy in art. She also believes in idiosyncratic, individualistic, and eccentric art making. She has published six artist's books with Granary Books, including collaborations with poets: Bed Hangings, with Susan Howe, A Girl's Life, with Johanna Drucker, Log Rhythms and Little Orphan Anagram with Charles Bernstein and The Burning Babe and Other Poems with Jerome Rothenberg. She is coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, with writings by over 100 artists, critics, and poets, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She was the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues from 1986-1996 and is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.


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Wednesday, 11/17

A Poetry Reading by Ammiel Alcalay

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

Ammiel Alcalay is poet, translator, critic, scholar and activist; he teaches in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College and is a member of the faculties of American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center where is also Deputy Chair of the PhD Program in English. He was the first holder of the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetics at Georgetown University and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University. His latest book, Islanders, a novel, is out from City Lights in 2010. Scrapmetal: work in progress came out with Factory School in 2007. from the warring factions, a book length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, came out in 2002, and is due for a 2nd edition in 2010. Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East, a lecture given at Cornell, was published in 2003 by Palm Press. Other books include After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the cairo noteboooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993), and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999). He has translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues (City Lights, 1998) and Nine Alexandrias (City Lights 2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996), and the co-translation of a Hebrew novel (with Oz Shelach), Outcast, by Shimon Ballas (City Lights, 2007). A Little History, a book of essays on politics and poetics is due out in 2010 from Beyond Baroque. He has also been involved as an activist on many domestic and international issues. He has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles and translations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, al-Ahram, The New Republic, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Sulfur, The Nation, and various other publications in the United States and abroad. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and he organized, with Mike Kelleher, the OlsonNow project. Most recently, he is the founder and general editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.


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Thursday, 11/18

RealArts@Penn Presents Rob Sheffield

Talking to Girls about Duran Duran

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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


In this tuneful coming-of-age memoir, the glamorous New Wave band Duran Duran presides spiritually over the all-consuming teenage male efforts to comprehend the opposite sex. Music journalist Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape) chronicles his passage through the 1980s in a series of chapters in which period groups—from headliners like Roxy Music and Prince to one-hit wonders like Haysi Fantayzee of Shiny Shiny semifame—provides musical accompaniment to his adolescent angst. They are the soundtrack to his fumbling attempts to dance or make passes at girls, to weather a winless stint on the high school wrestling team, to survive a summer job as an ice-cream truck driver. The relationship insights he arrives at—chiefly, the imperative of unquestioning submission to female whims—are no more or less cogent than the song lyrics he gleans them from. The book really shines as a collection of free-form riffs on the glorious foolishness of Reagan-era entertainment—the movie E.T., he writes, was about a sad muppet who thought he was David Bowie—and its weirdly resonant emotional impact. The result is a funny, poignant browse from a wonderful pop-culture evocateur. —Publishers Weekly

Rob Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he writes about all aspects of popular culture. He is also the author of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time and, most recently, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut.


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Friday, 11/19

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Saturday, 11/20

Sunday, 11/21

Monday, 11/22

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Tuesday, 11/23

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Wednesday, 11/24

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Thursday, 11/25

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Friday, 11/26

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Saturday, 11/27

Sunday, 11/28

Monday, 11/29

LIVE at the Writers House presents Playwrights Forum

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).

Interact theatre actors perform the work of local playwrights in the Playwrights Forum, a group of writers that meets monthly to share their work. Play excerpts will feature the work of playwrights Genne Murphy, Seth Bauer, Jackie Goldfinger, Mike Whistler and Quinn Eli.

Excerpts will be read by Interact Theatre Company actors Amanda Schoonover, Zura Johnson, Keith Conallen, and Ames Adamso.

Founded in 1988, InterAct's aim is to educate, as well as entertain its audiences, by producing world-class, thought-provoking productions, and by using theatre as a tool to foster positive social change in the school, the workplace and the community. Through its artistic and educational programs, InterAct seeks to make a significant contribution to the cultural life of Philadelphia and to the American theatre.

InterAct strives to cultivate new voices for the theatre. The company believes in developing and producing important new plays that represent our time and place, and introducing new writers to local audiences. InterAct strives to produce plays that explore issues of social, cultural and political relevance. InterAct uses the unique power and magic of the theatre to ask difficult questions about the world we live in, examining the forces that influence what we believe and why. InterAct dares to dramatize complex and controversial issues with artistic integrity and fairness.

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Tuesday, 11/30

A Poetry Reading by Kate Eichhorn and Jenny Sampirisi

presented by the Emergency Poetry Series

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

curated by: Sarah Dowling and Julia Bloch
watch: a video recording of this event via KWH-TV
listen: to an audio recording of this event on PennSound

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.

Kate Eichhorn is the author of Fond (BookThug, 2008), a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award and Fieldnotes, a forensic (BookThug, 2010) and co-editor of Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Coach House Books, 2009). Her poetry, prose and criticism are part of a serial investigation of historiography, ethnography and poetics. She teaches writing and cultural theory at The New School University in New York City.


Jenny Sampirisi is the author of is/was, a novel, and Croak, an in progress collection of poems. She's the managing editor of BookThug, co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing and Associate Director of the Scream Literary Festival.


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