Al Filreis
Ferlinghetti & I on the Culture Gabfest
It was an honor to be asked to be part of this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest (which I have listened to since it started in something like 2005). I talked with Steve Metcalf and Dana Stevens about Lawrence Ferlinghetti and we listened to a performance of “Baseball Canto”: https://slate.com/podcasts/culture-gabfest/2021/03/the-woody-allen-scandal-reviewing-allen-v-farrow Enjoy the...
Maury Povich & Connie Chung to endow Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House
I am thrilled and honored to announce that Maury Povich (College ’62) & Connie Chung have decided to make a significant gift to the Kelly Writers House to endow our annual Summer Workshop for Young Writers. The gift provides financial aid to support approximately half of the high school juniors and seniors who are selected...
Ron Silliman receives Beltran Award for Innovative Teaching
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,...
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. He is currently writing a book on the art & avant-garde of 1960. He has taught a massive open online course, "
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 