Cosmic Writers
I’m honored to have been the faculty mentor/advisor for Cosmic Writers (aka Word Camp). Click here for a Penn Today article about the project. Cosmic Writers brings free creative writing education to school-aged children. In...
Al Filreis Blog
Roger Angell on the catcher
Among my favorite pieces of prose is the long opening paragraph of Roger Angell’s New Yorker essay “In the Fire.” Here it is:
Review of “The Difference Is Spreading” in LARB
A review of The Difference Is Spreading has been published the Los Angeles Review of Books. Click HERE to read it.
Philadelphia teacher in TIP seminar undertakes mural project
Lisa Yau was a participant in a seminar for Philadelphia teachers I taught a few years ago. I’m excited & proud of what she has done with the project she undertook in our poetry...
Poem mentions me as “interlocutor-host”
Ian Morrisson sent me a chapbook of poems. It is in part a response to my essay on paraphonotextuality published a few years ago in AModern. Among Ian’s poems I found this one!
Video: discussion with Matvei Yankelevich about his new book “Dead Winter”
Matvei Yankelevich, Ahmad Almallah, Kevin Platt & I discussed Matvei’s marvelous new book of poems, “Dead Winter.” Ahmad’s students joined us and toward the end got wonderfully involved in the conversation.
Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care — reunion with a brilliant former student
Wendy Bach returned to Penn (she was my student in the late 80s/early 90s) and I had the honor of hosting & moderating a conversation with her about her forthcoming book “Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing...
Jan Baetens reviews “1960” for “Leonardo”
A review of my book 1960 has been published in Leonardo — by Jan Baetens. It’s insightful and detailed and — I’m happy to say — really gets what I’m trying to do in this study...
A computer-generated Dickinson poem about war
A generous colleague in computer science engineering is letting me play with a program he’s building that has absorbed 5,000 poems and is learning how to make poetry based on prompts. I put in...
Filreis profiled in article titled “Dwelling in Possibility”
“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 last bottle
When my parents moved from New Jersey to Florida, after many decades living in their modest NJ split-level, I spent a weekend at the old house helping with junk, boxes of giveaways, sorting tools,...
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 
Founder/Faculty Director, 
PoemTalk’s crew took to the road, wandering pretty much as far west as one can go on this continent, to a place Philip Whalen called, in a poem’s subtitle, “the last of California” — Bolinas, coastal spot famous as A congenial writer’s retreat. Stephen Ratcliffe, Joanne Kyger, and Julia Bloch gathered there with Al Filreis to talk about Whalen. Our poem was indeed written in Bolinas, in 1968, and finished in Kyoto in 1969. It’s called “Life at Bolinas: The Last of California.” Whalen’s PennSound page includes a recording of his performance of this poem, the final poem he read at an event in Albuquerque in 1987. Click 