My Springfield Town Pool badge, 1966. When I wasn’t at camp in the summer, this is where I hung out. Best memories: my father, the late Sam Filreis, coming home from an exhausting day at work and commuter traffic on Route 22, quickly changed at home, met us at the...
My dad—Sam Filreis—passed away suddenly on Thanksgiving a year ago. In 2007 he and I went on a river cruise up the Rhone in southern France, and brought back 4 bottles of a perfect Beaujolais, purchased after spending a happy afternoon drinking with the proprietors of a backcountry vineyard. When...
A family wedding in Gloucester, Mass. — perfect early-November weather and lots of occasions for running along the seawalls. We also drove up to Rockport and hiked out to the quarry in Halibut State Park. Click on any photo for a larger view and a permanent URL.
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.