Here is an article about a new grant. At an energizing reception held at the University Meeting and Guest House, members of the 12 winning teams of the inaugural Draw Down the Lightning grants broke bread while sharing ideas, celebrating successes, and thinking about the challenges ahead—literally embodying the collaborative...
Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Nate Silver before an audience of several hundred people. Mostly we discussed Silver’s 2024 book, On the Edge: the Arts of Risking Everything. HERE is a link to an article written about the event. The concluding paragraph: ‘Silver’s openness to randomness was later...
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...
The late Bob Lucid (Bob hired me, mentored me & later secured 3805 Locust Walk as a site for what become the Writers House) spoke in stunning, seemingly aimless periodic sentences. This photo was taken just after I interviewed him as the Writers House turned 10 years old in 2006....
My brilliant former student (class of 1987) Jeff Martinek has been a professor at Iowa Wesleyan for many years—and recently won a teacher-of-the-year award. A local newspaper covered the commencement speech he gave to the graduating class. He recalled his Penn graduation in Franklin Field. From his speech: “It was...
I’m honored to have been the faculty mentor/advisor for Cosmic Writers (aka Word Camp). Click here for a Penn Today article about the project. Cosmic Writers brings free creative writing education to school-aged children. In the photo below: recent graduates Rowana Miller and Manoj Simha lead the new nonprofit supported by...
Wendy Bach returned to Penn (she was my student in the late 80s/early 90s) and I had the honor of hosting & moderating a conversation with her about her forthcoming book “Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care.” Here’s a photo of us before the event. Below is a link to the video...
“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...
Recently the son of a long-time friend of writer Jerre Mangione sent me a typescript he found among his mother’s papers—an unpublished version of Jerre’s “Life Sentences” series. These were single-sentence poem-like things, satires all. Here’s one of them.
I was honored to receive the Faculty Award of Merit given by the Penn alumni in 2020. The ceremony was delayed by a year, and in October of 2021 the ceremony was presented via livestream. Here is a recording of the brief talk I gave in response to receiving the...
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.