On Thursday, October 25, starting at 5 PM at Kelly Writers House, I will have the honor of hosting Mehrsa Baradaran, this year’s featured guest at our annual Weber Symposium. RSVP by writing to mingo@writing.upenn.edu. Free & open to all but seating is limited, so RSVP soon! I am nearly...
Construction has begun on the Arts Cafe here at the Kelly Writers House. The architects are DIGSAU, a team led by Jeff Goldstein and Aaron Jezzi. The contractor is Murphy, Quigley, led by Nick Holz. Acoustics are being handled by Metropolitan Acoustics, led by Seth Harrison. At Penn our project...
Rolf Potts returned to the Writers House recently and, after leading a public program he and I went into the Wexler Studio to record an episode of his fine podcast series, “Deviate.” It was a long interview. Even after some editing, it’s still 93 minutes long. You can listen to...
During a meeting in which I and architect Jeff Goldstein (of the DIGSAU firm) presented on our plan to renovate and expand the Arts Cafe at KWH, Laurie Olin, the eminent architect, sketched the south-facing end of the plan for the space & sketched me too.
English 589 – Modern & Contemporary U.S. Poetry: Poetics & Pedagogy Fall 2018 — Mondays 3-6 PM Arts Café, Kelly Writers House This survey of experimental modern and contemporary U.S. poetry will be taught collaboratively,* and its primary mode will be interactive and iterative. This will be simultaneously a course...
On Wednesday (November 8th) the artist and photographer-poet Erica Baum—whose work we encounter in week 10 of our course, next week—will be spending the day visiting us at the Kelly Writers House. We are all very excited about Erica’s visit. Anyone ModPo’er anywhere in the world can join us for...
Orhan Pamuk is visiting Penn tomorrow—and I’m proud that Kelly Writers House & the Middle East Center have joined together to make these events possible. Pamuk’s 6 PM reading at KWH is full (no seats left), but we will be streaming the event live. That’s tomorrow—Thursday, October 12—starting at exactly...
Some members of the ModPo team spent nearly a week in London. We hosted a live webcast at Queen Mary University of London on Thursday, October 5th, and a meet-up on Saturday, October 7th at Birkbeck University of London, where with a group of 35 ModPo people who came from...
Today in “Representations of the Holocaust” we discussed Spiegelman’s Maus and were visited by the family of one of the students (including her survivor grandmother) and also by Diane & Jerry Rothenberg. It was an intense session and ended with Jerry’s preface to Khurbn in which he turns around Adorno’s...
Tonight we hosted a ModPo live webcast at Kelly Writers House — on the week 3 syllabus: a selection of imagist poems and a few imagist-ish poems by William Carlos Williams. Here are some photos.
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. His new book is 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (Columbia University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a book about online pedagogy. He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 265,000 participants in 192 countries since 2012.
Founder/Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House—intro video ][ events calendar
Convener/teacher, “ModPo.” an open online course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry—overview of the course ][ intro video
Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—my Jacket2 commentary series ][ "First Readings"
Producer/host, PoemTalk podcast series—co-sponsored by Kelly Writers House & the Poetry Foundation
Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing—Creative Writing ][ RealArts internships ]
Co-founder & co-director of PennSound—50,000 files ][ 15 million downloads annually
Teacher & host, "Kelly Writers House Fellows"—since 1999 ][ Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Laurie Anderson, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, John Edgar Wideman & more
Teacher, "Representations of the Holocaust"—a course on survivor testimony ][ my holocaust site
Click on the image for information about the book.