December 2021
Wednesday, 12/1
Thursday, 12/2
RealArts@Penn Internships: info session
12:30 PM (ET) in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
Have you been dreaming of the perfect summer internship? One that might help set you on your career path? RealArts@Penn can help make that dream a reality! RealArts@Penn offers paid summer internships in publishing, TV and film, journalism, public relations, talent management, music, theater, and museums. Premier partner/host organizations have included ViacomCBS, Brooklyn Films, Downtown Bookworks, Pitchfork Media, Morgan Museum and Library and Artists First. The project draws upon a vast network of creative alumni who help enable hands-on and face-to-face interactions between students and the people who make arts and culture their business. Join us for an informal conversation with past RealArts@Penn interns to learn more about the project and the application process.
A celebration of 1960, a new book by Al Filreis
6:00 PM (ET) in the KWH Garden and on YouTube
Hosted by Charles Bernstein and Laynie Browne
REGISTER HERE to attend in person
watch: here
Join us for a celebration of the newest book by Kelly Writers House Faculty Director Al Filreis, 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern.
In 1960, when World War II might seem to have been receding into history, a number of artists and writers instead turned back to it. They chose to confront the unprecedented horror and mass killing of the war, searching for new creative and political possibilities after the conservatism of the 1950s in the long shadow of genocide.
Filreis recasts 1960 as a turning point to offer a groundbreaking account of postwar culture. He examines an eclectic group of artistic, literary, and intellectual figures who strove to create a new language to reckon with the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world. Filreis reflects on the belatedness of this response to the war and the Holocaust and shows how key works linked the legacies of fascism and antisemitism with American racism. In grappling with the memory of the war, he demonstrates, artists reclaimed the radical elements of modernism and brought forth original ideas about testimony to traumatic history.
Friday, 12/3
Saturday, 12/4
Sunday, 12/5
Monday, 12/6
A Reading by the Students of Xfic
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program
Xfic is Penn's first and only experimental nonfiction journal. Students spend a semester working on one piece and building a magazine from the ground up. Our reading will feature excerpts from students' pieces — which include stories about Reddit, motherhood, memory, and Twin Peaks.
Anna Collins is the Publicity Director for Xfic and a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English with a minor in Linguistics. She was born and raised in Philadelphia, a fact which she will never shut up about. She spends a lot of her time doing theater, which is, in fact, extremely embarrassing, and the rest of the time getting excited about old pieces of media, which is somehow even more embarrassing.
Eva Ingber is a Copy Editor for Xfic and a junior at the University of Pennsylvania balancing (or trying to) the pre-med track while studying English and minoring in Chemistry and Neuroscience. She has been a writer and an editor at 34th Street Magazine for the past two years, and is currently serving as co-editor of the magazine's Features section. Her work has been featured multiple times in Equilibria Magazine, an arts and literary magazine at Penn. She is also an associate editor at Synapse, Penn's premier multidisciplinary student run healthcare publication. Eva also works in the Gottfried Lab, a lab devoted to understanding and investigating the sense of smell. When she's not studying, you can find Eva hanging out with friends and family, with her nose in a book, or blasting Phoebe Bridgers.
Brian Lee is a Copy Editor for Xfic and a senior at the University of Pennsylvania who wastes his time drinking too many pumpkin spice lattes and rewatching The Good Place. In phone calls home, he tells his parents he's earning a biology degree and is therefore guaranteed to have a "job" after graduation.
Anna Naggar is a senior from Seattle, studying English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Outreach Director of Xfic. She writes nonfiction from a performative vantage point, most recently focusing on motherhood. In her free time, Anna works as a marketing intern at the beauty startup IL MAKIAGE.
Daniel Tao is the Web Editor for Daily Pennsylvanian and 34th Street Magazine in the past. Though when he says written, he means websites. He ardently believes the harrier jump jet is an overrated method of increasing one's gravitational potential as compared to traversing up a flight of stairs.
Peyton Toups is a 21 year-old writer from New Orleans studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also the Art Director of Xfic, and the Music Editor of 34th Street Magazine. He serves on the mastheads of Q-INE and The Penn Review. When he is not in class, he can be found in his room crying to Taylor Swift. His work has received recognition from the William Faulkner Literary Competition. You can read more of his work at Equilibria and listen to his weekly playlists here.
Chelsey Zhu is the managing editor of Xfic. She's also a student journalist, podcast junkie, and English major at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a managing editor at 34th Street Magazine, Wexler Studio assistant at the Kelly Writers House, and producer and co-host of The Kidlit Chronicles, a podcast on children’s literature. Her life revolves around her dog, Korean dramas, and brunch.
Tuesday, 12/7
Generation Pandemic
A presentation by Alan Jinich and Max Strickberger
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café
Generation Pandemic is an oral history archive that documents the impact of COVID-19 on young adults in America. During the spring of 2021, Alan Jinich and Max Strickberger conducted over 80 interviews with 18–25 year olds, meeting people across 16 states and 7,300 miles. The archive explores how the pandemic has exacerbated tensions intrinsic to young adulthood, highlighting how uncertainty has influenced major life decisions and future plans. Stories reveal generational themes of sudden movement and entrapment, delayed independence, introspection, and attempts at self-realization.
Alan Jinich by Max Strickberger are seniors at the University of Pennsylvania studying neuroscience and English, respectively. They’ve been close friends since childhood and grew up on the same street outside of Washington, DC. If you have any questions or have a story you’d like to share, reach out at strickm@sas.upenn.edu and jinich@sas.upenn.edu.
Find Generation Pandemic: here
Wednesday, 12/8
A reading by students in Kathryn Watterson's memoir workshop
6:00 PM (ET) in the Arts Café and on YouTube
An intimate reading of stories written and curated by students in Kathryn "Kitsi" Watterson's course Writing & Remembering: A Memoir Workshop.
Thursday, 12/9
Writers House Salon
Featuring Piyali Bhattacharya, Skye Lucas (C'21), Wes Matthews (C'23), and Hillary Reinsberg (C'11), with Al Filreis
7:30 PM (ET) via Zoom
Register by email: rsvp@writing.upenn.edu
Suggested $20 donation here
The Writers House Salon takes the place of our annual "Writers House New York," held each fall since 2002 in
Soho at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery. This year’s special virtual salon, held in support of the outreach and inclusion efforts
of the Kelly Writers House will include readings by current students, alumni, and faculty, conversations about the student
experience of the Writers House, and a collaborative close reading of a poem, led by Al Filreis.
As with every year, we are asking for a suggested $20 per person donation — this year every gift made will be a celebration of Paul Kelly.
This donation is a tax-deductible contribution to the Kelly Writers House. You can donate in advance here
or donate live during the event. If you are a prospective student or their family, we would like to invite to you attend as our guest.
Piyali Bhattacharya's short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The New York Times, and National Geographic, among other publications, and her novel about un/documented South Asian immigrants in New York City has been supported by fellowships from Hedgebrook and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the editor of the anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, which received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Independent Publisher Book Award. She holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, an M.A. from SOAS—University of London, and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she was winner of the Peter Straub Award for Fiction. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.
Skye Lucas (C'21) is a recent undergraduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and a student of Al Filreis and Jamie-Lee Josselyn. After graduating Skye moved to northwest Montana to report for The Flathead Beacon, a local weekly newspaper owned by fellow alumnnus Maury Povich. For five months she wrote about happenings in the Flathead Valley, such as covering the increase in Ivermectin sales at local livestock and feed stores, and grassroot efforts to secure employee housing in the tiny town of Whitefish, Montana. As random or out-there as this adventure may seem, it really wasn’t! The Kelly Writers House and Real Arts have been sending students to the Beacon for years, and Skye continued that legacy. She hopes other students get to work alongside local journalists at the independent newspaper in the coming years, and is grateful for Mingo Reynolds, who encouraged Skye to take a chance on wide-open spaces.
Wes Matthews (C'23) is a Detroit-born, Philadelphia-based poet and essayist. His work has been published in 68to05, Scoundrel Time, Muzzle, and elsewhere. Wes served as the 2018-19 Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate and received the Congressional Award for “outstanding and invaluable service to the community.” He is the recipient of the 2020 College Alumni Society Prize for his poetry and the 2020 Lillian and Benjamin Levy Award for his music criticism. Wes is a third-year student at Penn and works as a Wexler Studio Assistant at the Kelly Writers House.
Hillary Reinsberg (C'11) is the Editor-In-Chief at The Infatuation and Zagat. The Infatuation's first hire, Hillary has overseen the editorial expansion of the restaurant review platform and its signature voice into cities across the U.S and U.K. She also played a key role in The Infatuation's acquisition of the legendary restaurant guide Zagat from Google. Hillary had been an early member of BuzzFeed's news team, and as a writer and editor there covered everything from New Hampshire's election of the first all-female state delegation to viral trends on YouTube. While a student at Penn, Hillary was the first editor of Under The Button and edited 34th Street. She has been recognized by Forbes' 30 Under 30 list and has appeared on panels, podcasts, and television as an expert on food, restaurants, and media.