I gavethe introductory chapter of my forthcoming book to a machine that makes podcasts from text. The result is not perfectly accurate but does give you a fair, informal sense of what I’m saying in the book. Listen here: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/Crowdsourcing-Poetry-in-online-learning.mp3 Thanks to Charles Bernstein for tipping me off about this...
Published in the June 2023 issue of Marsh Hawk Press Review — my speculative essay, “Notes toward a Pedagogy of ModPo,” in which I attempt to understand what has been happening in ModPo in the last decade in relation to the idea of learner-centered learning and third spaces. HERE is...
The essay was commissioned by Derek Beaulieu as he prepared to celebrate 25 years of No Press and housepress. I have now received a copy of a book, entitled Paper and Thread, edited by Derek, which includes my essay about Fred Wah along with contributions by Kyle Schlesinger, Charles Bernstein,...
I was invited by Rob McLennan to contribute an essay to a festschrift for Pattie McCarthy. I chose to write about her book Wifthing. Here is the essay:
Review of 1960 by Rob Baxter: Al Filreis’s 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern, is a compendium of the belated responses of fiction, poetry, history, painting, sculpture, film television and every medium of art and communication to the language defying...
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...
HERE is a link to a new essay co-written by Anna Strong Safford, Davy Knittle, and me, published in a book of essays, Teaching Literature in the Online Classroom, eds. John Miller and Julie Wilhelm. Our article is titled “Collaborative Close Reading and Global Conversation in the Co-Constitutive Online Classroom.”
The editors of Alchemy Spoon have participated in ModPo and recently asked me to write an essay about ModPo for their 7th issue (published in August 2022). My goal in this piece is to reconsider the initial backlash against MOOCs (2012-13) in relation to the controversy around online teaching and...
This nice “Choice” review is being published in the September 2022 issue. Here is a sneak preview:
Grzegorz Wróblewski will have a new book out soon—titled ‘Dear Beloved Humans.’ Here is my blurb: ‘In this book find short brilliant grim verse tales — such as the tale of Anne who lives inside her white dress, or that of the poet who is the only one (including former...
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.