On December 5, 2016, Jed Rasula visited the Kelly Writers House to talk about Dada — and in particular about his recent book on the subject. Here, below, is a 6-minute excerpt from that discussion, in which Al Filreis attempts to get Rasula to talk about how anyone could teach...
Today Nathaniel Mackey concluded his visit to the Kelly Writers House as a Writers House Fellow — with a one-hour interview/conversation moderated by me. Here are some photos I took here and there throughout the day.
Nate read a poem from Blue Fasa while Hannah Judd joined him for an improvised duet—poet’s Andoumboulous voice and cello.
Nathaniel Mackey is here as a Kelly Writers House Fellow for several days. Yesterday he joined me and the students in the Kelly Writers House Fellows seminar for an intense three-hour conversation about his work and much else. In the evening he gave a spectacular reading from his work —...
In this video, Alan Bernheimer responds to questions about his translation of Philippe Soupault’s Lost Profiles: A Memoir of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, which was published in November by City Lights. The book is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by a co-founder of the Surrealist movement. The...
On March 2, at the Kelly Writers House, Fatemeh Shams, a poet who writes in Persian, and Dick Davis, an eminent translator from Persian to English, discussed her poems and his translations—and the art of translation generally. We are now making available both audio and video recordings of this event:...
To watch the event in its entirety follow this link to the KWH calendar. To hear more of Mayer’s work follow this link to her PennSound page.
A Penn Current article describes the new Summer Workshop for Young Writers at the Kelly Writers House. It begins: This summer, Kelly Writers House will host its first intensive writing workshop for high school juniors and seniors. Directed by Jamie-Lee Josselyn, associate director for recruitment at the Center for Programs...
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.