I couldn’t resist sharing the results, published in Science, of a recent study that shows that in adults “world-class performance” is associated with limited discipline-specific practice, with increased multidiscilplinary practice, and with “gradual” progress when people are students. The study is a boost for those of us who believe in wide rather than...
My new book is featured by “The Page 99 Test.” They ask authors to re-read page 99 of their books and write a short piece about how and why what appears on page 99 represents the whole book and the whole argument. HERE is my effort at fulfilling this interesting...
I have made an audio recording of the introductory chapter of my new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community (Columbia University Press, 2025). Listen to the audio HERE.
Click HERE to read three pages from the final chapter of my new book, The Classroom at the Crowd. In this passage I do some complaining about the way in which AI applied to a humanities online course prejudicially enforces the very sort of language and meaning-making that a course...
From 1996 through 1998 or so I taught poetry to 150 people, for free, “by computer,” as the phrasing was then. They took the name “Alumverse,” since almost all of them were alumni of the University of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t my first experience teaching online, but it was my initial...
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...
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...
On April 16 I was interviewed by Gerry Fialka for 90 minutes—about poetry, intersubjectivity, education, and medium-over-message. It’s a YouTube series called “InnerViews” and my conversation is episode 612.
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,...
Bret stopped by to say hi at our open house yesterday. It was the 20th reunion of his graduating class (2004). As a sophomore, 3 years earlier, he was in my course on the holocaust (co-taught then with the great Penny Marcus of our Italian department). That was the fall...
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; 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (2021); and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. His new book is The Classroom & the Crowd: Poetry & the Promise of Digital Community (2025). He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 315,000 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.