Poem mentions me as “interlocutor-host”
Ian Morrisson sent me a chapbook of poems. It is in part a response to my essay on paraphonotextuality published a few years ago in AModern. Among Ian’s poems I found this one!
Category: pedagogy
Filreis profiled in article titled “Dwelling in Possibility”
“Celebrating poetry and literature at Penn since 1985, Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, continues to create community at the home for writers he founded in a Locust Walk house a quarter-century ago.” The opening of a profile about me written by Louisa Shepard. HERE is your link to...
Ron Silliman receives Beltran Award for Innovative Teaching
I am thrilled to announce that the recipient of the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching for 2020-21 is Ron Silliman, who has taught creative writing seminars brilliantly for many years by now. The award, endowed by the Beltran family, is given each year, through a process of student nominations,...
My publisher’s note to the student-made “Autobiography of Gertrude Stein”
The students of Kenneth Goldsmith’s year-long seminar, “Writing about Contemporary Art,” have made an exact replica of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — well, exact except that their book is titled The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein and all references to Gertrude in the third person have been first...
Al Filreis, “Citizen Poetics”
I have published an essay titled “Citizen Poetics” in a special issue (on poetry networks) of College Literature, volume 47, number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 259-281. Click HERE to read a PDF copy of the essay.
video: celebration of my “Professor of the Year” award, 1998
In 1998-99 I was named the “Pennsylvania Professor of the Year” by the Carnegie Foundation, a huge honor even though I don’t quite know what the award specifically meant. My friends and colleagues at Penn took this as a sign that our success in establishing the Writers House starting 1995-96...
1995 local news story on my modern poetry course
In 1995 the local news station decided that the way I was teaching modern poetry was innovative. So they researched and then filmed a story about it all. This was and is English 88, now also known as ModPo. Here is the LINK to the old video (with thanks to...
A former student looks back on my poetry class 20 years later
This is David Slarskey, tweeting all these years later about his experience in English 88, the course on modern and contemporary experimental poetry I’ve been teaching now for 34 years. David took the experimentalism seriously, as you’ll see. This being twitter, you’ll need, of course, to read from bottom to...
modernism for multi-lingual students
This spring (along with Lily Applebaum & Anna Strong Safford) I have taught a seminar in which the participants are Philadelphia public school teachers. The students of one teacher are grade schoolers who are multi-lingual (mostly from immigrant families). The curriculum unit she is drafting—to use in her class next...
Answers to a few questions about MOOCs
Questions posed to me with a student in Germany doing a research project on MOOCs: Q. Technology has certainly made information more accessible, and it’s amazing to see the kind of pedagogy offered through MOOCs such as ModPo become freely available. The only drawback I see is a lack 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 
Founder/Faculty Director, 