The kind of Charles Bernstein I want
I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection of responses to Bernstein’s new book, The Kind of Poetry I Want. And here is the essay as now published: HERE in Boundary2 magazine.
Category: Featured Post
“The Classroom & the Crowd” is now available for pre-ordering
My new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, will be published by Columbia University Press just after Thanksgiving 2025. You can pre-order a copy (e-book, hardcover or paperback) HERE. A description: For more than a decade, Al Filreis has taught a free online...
In conversation with Nate Silver
Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Nate Silver before an audience of several hundred people. Mostly we discussed Silver’s 2024 book, On the Edge: the Arts of Risking Everything. HERE is a link to an article written about the event. The concluding paragraph: ‘Silver’s openness to randomness was later...
Gertrude Stein in Morocco
I had the honor of convening a collaborative close reading with students at Ibn Zohr University in Morocco yesterday. Their teacher, Professor El Habib Louai, is a friend of contemporary poets and poetry teachers and critics—of PoemTalk and ModPo. He has been interested in the collaborative close reading method. Yesterday,...
Simone White is Associate Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House
Simone White, whose work as poet, teacher, art critic, theorist, and performer has achieved international recognition, has been named Associate Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. She has been closely affiliated with the Writers House since she jo ined the Penn faculty in 2018 and now joins Faculty Director...
June Jordan, though exhausted, reads “Poem for a Young Poet” on request (2001)
June Jordan was a Kelly Writers House Fellow in 2001. She was battling through hard treatment for cancer and her usual great strength was diminished, and when toward the end of her public reading a student asked for a reprise of “Poem for a Young Poet” I could tell that...
The late Robert Coover, genius maker of fictions
In 2009 Robert Coover spent some days with us as a Kelly Writers House Fellow—thus I had the great great pleasure of reading & teaching most of his stunningly fabulous books. His visit was unforgettable. My interview/conversation with him is available here: https://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/coover.html along with links to other aspects of...
Interview/conversation with poet Larry Price
New—an interview/conversation with poet Larry Price, moderated by me and Bill Fuller: https://jacket2.org/podcasts/larry-price ‘In this episode, poet Larry Price joins Al Filreis and William Fuller for an interview in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House to discuss his new book 1/0 (“one over zero”), as well as some...
Article marks the 200th episode of PoemTalk
Here’s a nice feature on PoemTalk — written on the occasion of the recording of our 200th episode: LINK “It’s such an honor. I have been a listener to ‘PoemTalk’ from the early days right up to the present. So I came into the room feeling the weight and the...
I interview Victor Bockris about the interview
Recently at the Kelly Writers House I interviewed Victor Bokris about the interview. HERE is a Daily Pennsylvanian article about the event. And HERE is the recording of the YouTube livestream. Bockris graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. After graduation, he founded Telegraph Press, a seminal small press...
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, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; 
Founder/Faculty Director, 