“Celebrating poetry and literature at Penn since 1985, Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, continues to create community at the home for writers he founded in a Locust Walk house a quarter-century ago.” The opening of a profile about me written by Louisa Shepard. HERE is your link to...
I am thrilled to announce that the recipient of the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching for 2020-21 is Ron Silliman, who has taught creative writing seminars brilliantly for many years by now. The award, endowed by the Beltran family, is given each year, through a process of student nominations,...
The students of Kenneth Goldsmith’s year-long seminar, “Writing about Contemporary Art,” have made an exact replica of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — well, exact except that their book is titled The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein and all references to Gertrude in the third person have been first...
I have published an essay titled “Citizen Poetics” in a special issue (on poetry networks) of College Literature, volume 47, number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 259-281. Click HERE to read a PDF copy of the essay.
In 1998-99 I was named the “Pennsylvania Professor of the Year” by the Carnegie Foundation, a huge honor even though I don’t quite know what the award specifically meant. My friends and colleagues at Penn took this as a sign that our success in establishing the Writers House starting 1995-96...
In 1995 the local news station decided that the way I was teaching modern poetry was innovative. So they researched and then filmed a story about it all. This was and is English 88, now also known as ModPo. Here is the LINK to the old video (with thanks to...
This is David Slarskey, tweeting all these years later about his experience in English 88, the course on modern and contemporary experimental poetry I’ve been teaching now for 34 years. David took the experimentalism seriously, as you’ll see. This being twitter, you’ll need, of course, to read from bottom to...
This spring (along with Lily Applebaum & Anna Strong Safford) I have taught a seminar in which the participants are Philadelphia public school teachers. The students of one teacher are grade schoolers who are multi-lingual (mostly from immigrant families). The curriculum unit she is drafting—to use in her class next...
Questions posed to me with a student in Germany doing a research project on MOOCs: Q. Technology has certainly made information more accessible, and it’s amazing to see the kind of pedagogy offered through MOOCs such as ModPo become freely available. The only drawback I see is a lack of...
Someone asked me to write a short statement about online teaching. This is what I wrote: Teaching all-online courses—which I have done for many years by now—has completely refreshed my pedagogy. My students are intergenerational, diverse in all ways, typically geographically far-flung, and often living in communities underserved by educational...
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.