WH Calendar: March 2008 (original) (raw)

February March 2008 April

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All events take place at the Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia (U of P).

Saturday, 3/1

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 3/2

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 3/3

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Tuesday, 3/4

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Wednesday, 3/5

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Thursday, 3/6

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Friday, 3/7

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Saturday, 3/8

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 3/9

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 3/10

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Tuesday, 3/11

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Wednesday, 3/12

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Thursday, 3/13

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Friday, 3/14

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Saturday, 3/15

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 3/16

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 3/17

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Tuesday, 3/18

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Wednesday, 3/19

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Thursday, 3/20

Download a recording of this event here.

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Friday, 3/21

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Saturday, 3/22

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 3/23

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 3/24

Watch the reading of this event here.

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Tuesday, 3/25

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is known for elegant and precise sentences, complex and thoughtful characters, and for telescopic range and microscopic focus. She is the author of nineteen books of fiction, nonfiction, translation and poetry. New York Magazine selected Schwartz's novel about September 11, 2001, The Writing on the Wall for its Best Literary Fiction Award in 2005. Schwartz has the ability to tell stories that would otherwise resist narration altogether. Her novel Rough Strife (1980), about the vicissitudes of a long marriage, was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award and a National Book Award. Leaving Brooklyn (1989), a coming-of-age novel, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Essays. Schwartz has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Disturbances in the Field, Schwartz's 1983 novel about loss, is known for its precision and humanity. The Kelly Writers House's own Max Apple, a renowned fiction writer himself, has said of Disturbances in the Field, "I have not been so wholly taken into an aura, a field, since I began being hypnotized by Dostoevski and Tolstoy and George Eliot ... I want to praise this book in every possible way."

Watch the discussion of this event here.


Persis Karim is currently an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at San Jose State University where she teaches literature and creative writing. She has published her poetry in numerous literary journals including Reed Magazine, Alimentum, Di-Verse-City, HeartLodge, and Caesura. She is the author of numerous articles on Iranian American literature and the editor of the anthology Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas Press, 2006). She is also co-editor and co-author of A World Between: Poems Short Stories and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999). She is currently working on a collection of essays, In the Belly of the Great Satan: Art, Literature and the Emergence of Iranian American Identity. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and her two beautiful sons.

Listen to a recording of this event.

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Wednesday, 3/26

Poet and scholar Chris Funkhouser is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2006 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to lecture and conduct research in Malaysia, where his CD-ROM eBook Selections 2.0 was produced at Multimedia University. In 2007 he published Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, a history of pre-WWW computerized poetry, in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at University of Alabama Press. Forthcoming is a bi-lingual collection of his writings, Technopoetry Rising: Essays and Works, which will be published in Brazil. For more info see http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous.

MACHINE showcases the literary uses of the computer. Poets, fiction writers, and others have been combining the networked and computational capabilities of digital machines with the workings of literature to produce new sorts of writing that exists online and on-screen: writing that plays on the context of the internet, requires interaction and input from the reader, and brings many different media together in new ways. MACHINE is a series in which writers of electronic literature come to the Kelly Writers House to read from and demonstrate their work, and to discuss the literary uses of the computer with area writers and members of the Penn community. For information about past events, visit writing.upenn.edu/wh/involved/series/machine/.

A recording of this event is available on PennSound

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Thursday, 3/27 * 12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Annual KWH marathon reading, featuringVladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the American publication of Vladimir Nabokov's infamous Lolita, a book that somehow managed to survive ahead of its time and overcome cultural backlash and governmental censorship to become one of the 20th century's canonical texts. Because we at the Writers House have always been fans of literature's rebels, we knew that this momentous occasion would not pass without joyous incident. We produced, fertilized, and incubated our scheme for celebration.
Beginning at noon and continuing, relentless, until we are done, a series of volunteers will read Lolita out loud in its entirety to an enraptured audience in our Arts Café! Whether you join us as a reader or a listener, for one hot minute or the whole day, you'll be treated to a delicious spread of treats plucked fresh from Lolita's pages, given the opportunity to purchase a limited-edition commemorative T-shirt designed by the Hub.
We need all the readers that we can get! If you are interested in a ten-minute time slot (and the complimentary CD featuring the chart-topping pop hits of Lolita's day that you'll receive for your participation) email Erin Gautsche at gautsche@writing.upenn.edu. How could you say no?
"When Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published in 1955 in Paris, it was soon banned for its controversial content. Yet as an underground readership grew, the novel gained international attention, and, as a result, the bans were lifted. Immediate responses to the work were understandably mixed. Many critics condemned it as pornographic trash, citing its 'obscene' descriptions of a pedophile's sexual activities. Others applauded the work's originality and sparkling wit. The novel has now, however, gained almost universal approval as a brilliant tour de force. Readers find middle-aged narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert to be both perpetrator and victim of his disastrous obsession with the young Lolita. In his record of his relationship with her, Humbert becomes a complex mixture of mad lecher who 'breaks' the life of a young girl and wild romantic who suffers in his pursuit of his unattainable ideal. Donald E. Morton, in his book Vladimir Nabokov, argues that 'what makes Lolita something more than either a case study of sexual perversion or pornographic titillation is the truly shocking fact that Humbert Humbert is a genius who, through the power of his artistry, actually persuades the reader that his memoir is a love story. Nabokov's technical brilliance and beautiful, evocative language help bring this tragic character to life.'"


Listen to a recording of the event.

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Friday, 3/28

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Saturday, 3/29

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Sunday, 3/30

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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Monday, 3/31

The Mad Poets Society, founded in 1987, has grown from humble roots and a handful of poets at Media Borough Hall in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, to over 100 members in six states. It is an organization of poets and writers who have joined together for camaraderie and critique with heart, to celebrate the creative soul and to promote the literary arts.

Among their goals is the desire to bring poetry and the appreciation of the spoken word to surrounding communities and to foster a supportive, nurturing atmosphere to promote individual growth. They provide an outlet for artistic energy and interests other than the workday world and offer opportunities and forums for new poets to express themselves in an encouraging atmosphere.

The Mad Poets come from all walks of life. Their members are teachers, brick-layers, lawyers, construction workers, secretaries, accountants -- everyone with a common link: the love of words.

A two-time finalist in the Allen Ginsberg Awards given by Paterson Literary Review, Eileen M. D'Angelo'spoetry and book reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming in literary magazines and newspapers including Rattle, Voices International, Wild River Review, Manhattan Poetry Review, Drexel Online Journal, Hinge Online, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Poets, The Aurealean, _New Hope International_in the United Kingdom, and others. She has been nominated for a Governor's Award in the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and was a judge for the Philadelphia area open auditions for HBO's pilot/series, Def Poetry Jam. Editor of the Mad Poets Review and Director of the Mad Poets Society, she has coordinated over a thousand readings and events since 1987. She is the paralegal to criminal defense attorney G. Guy Smith, and recipient of the Victim Rights Award from the District Attorney's Office, for volunteer work for the Domestic Abuse Project.

Stephen Delia has been writing poetry for just over 30 years. He has read in many libraries, coffee houses, and bars. He has done a street reading and has even read in a cemetery as part of Mad Poets event. In 2006, he judged the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Competition along with the poets Cleveland Wall and Galway Kinnell. He finished second place in the 2002 Mad Poets poetry slam. His last two chapbooks were Revisited, Revised and Retyped and last year's 1622 Church Street. He loves music and has been influenced by The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Donovan.

Missy Grotz went to Our Lady of Angels College (now John Neumann University) and eventually ended up at Penn State, where she graduated with a BA in English/Writing. She took the gypsy tour of various careers from retail to industrial engineering. She also went to work for a few extra bucks for an alarm company happily chasing down the phone numbers of deadbeat customers... it's a touch of detective work that she finds absolutely addictive.Of course, these experiences found their way into various poetry and short stories over the years! She ultimately ended up in civil service, where she hopes to stay until she expires.

Inspired by her 14 nieces & nephews, Missy has written several "Aunt Missy" books for children that she hopes to have illustrated in 2008. This year, she also plans to release a poetry book called Cat Chat. Missy thinks writing is easier to do when the frustration rises to the top - happy is a place that always dangles just out of reach.

Autumn Konopka has published poems in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mad Poets Review, Philadelphia Stories, and Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others. Her manuscript, What the Postwoman Left, was a semifinalist in the 2007 Crab Orchard Series Open Competition. Her poems have won awards from the Mad Poets Society and the Philadelphia Writers Conference; most recently, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2002, Autumn performed with Eileen D'Angelo, Missy Grotz, and a few other "wild women" as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Autumn has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University. She's been the host of the Mad Poets reading series in Bryn Mawr for several years, and she has also lead independent writing workshops and poetry classes for children and adults. Autumn is deeply interested in the way that socioeconomic class and memoir come to play in poetry, and she has researched and taught about both topics. This fall she will lead a workshop on writing about class in "classless" society at the Power of Words Conference at Goddard College.

Dan Maguire's work has won numerous prizes and awards and has appeared in The Mad Poets Review, The Comstock Review, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Paterson Literary Review, Big City Lit, The Philadelphia Inquirer and others. In May of 2000, the editors of The American Poetry Review selected him for a special workshop with the poet Robert Bly. He won first prize for poetry at the Philadelphia Writer's Conference in 2000 and again, in 2001. In February of 2004, he read at the Library of Congress of the United States. He has led poetry workshops through the Gloucester City (NJ) Adult Education Program, and the 2 Rivers Writers group. In 2005, he led one of the sessions at the first joint-workshop for disabled and non-disabled poets, held at Inglis House, in Philadelphia. He has also led workshops at the National Convention of State Poetry Societies and at the Philadelphia Writers Conference. His first volume of poetry, Somewhere Between, was published by Brief Candle Press, through a grant from the English Speaking Union. His second book will be published this fall.

Devin Greenwood was raised in the pine-barren town of Browns Mills, NJ the son of black and white school teachers. Possessed of a unique musical and spiritual vision, he has produced and influenced many of the artists in the emerging Philadelphia folk-rock scene, an eclectic group bound by its textural tentacles and broad lyrical scope. He recently released his eponymous debut EP, featuring five tracks from the past year's sessions at Scullville Studios in the south-jersey pines, produced by Greenwood and mixed with Rachel Russell and Shelly Yakus.

About the EP, WXPN's Bruce Warrenwrites "Since the early 2000s, Devin Greenwood has been at the center of a creative revitalization of the local music scene here in Philly due in large part to his work with Amos Lee, John Francis, Birdie Busch and Denison Witmer. Finally though, we have a solo album from Greenwood, undeniably one of Philly's most creative and talented musicians."

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 Majounhosts 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).

Please note that some of the discussions and classes listed below are open to the public and some require advance registration or enrollment. Call 215-746-POEM or e-mail wh@writing.upenn.edu for more info.

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