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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
David Roberts & I talked yesterday about Primo Levi, ‘The Periodic Table,’ and the problem of forgiveness—an interview for David’s terrific Substack series: https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/about . Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pghED_cWOg
Recording of my interview with Jennifer Egan last night (November 15, 2022). We talked about her terrific new novel, The Candy House. I’m particularly interested (no surprise) in her narrative and formal experiments, beginning with (in the opening minutes) a chapter in which she creates a second-person narration in tweet-length...
My dad, the late & much-missed Sam Filreis, was young & not world-savvy at the time of WW2 but he enlisted. He absolutely had the temperament of a pacifist (disliked fighting and disagreement, very placid in style, avoided conflict) but he enlisted nevertheless. I honor him for that decision. (In...
Alan Wald has published a thoughtful & generous review of my book 1960 in the journal The Global Sixties. Here are the opening sentences: With a thrilling indifference to more conventional approaches, University of Pennsylvania literary scholar Al Filreis adds a welcome and bracingly original dimension to our understanding of...
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.