HERE is a link to a new essay co-written by Anna Strong Safford, Davy Knittle, and me, published in a book of essays, Teaching Literature in the Online Classroom, eds. John Miller and Julie Wilhelm. Our article is titled “Collaborative Close Reading and Global Conversation in the Co-Constitutive Online Classroom.”
The editors of Alchemy Spoon have participated in ModPo and recently asked me to write an essay about ModPo for their 7th issue (published in August 2022). My goal in this piece is to reconsider the initial backlash against MOOCs (2012-13) in relation to the controversy around online teaching and...
A review of The Difference Is Spreading has been published the Los Angeles Review of Books. Click HERE to read it.
“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...
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.
We are adding a filmed discussion of Stephen Ratcliffe’s Sound of Wave in Channel, his 1,000-page poem which, in part, describes a view of the Pacific Ocean from a spot along the road in Bolinas, California—describes it every day for those 1,000 days. Earlier we released a PoemTalk episode filmed...
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...
This is for teachers of K-12 arts & humanities: ModPo is a free 10-week course on modern poetry. Since its founding in 2012 teachers and their students have enrolled and enjoyed the poems, videos & discussions. The ModPo site includes our Teacher Resource Center (TRC), which offers video guides to...
Each October the ModPo team travels to a city beyond—sometimes well beyond—our home at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. This year we will be coming to Montreal. We will be hosting TWO ModPo events: 1) a live interactive webcast on Thursday, October 4, starting at 6:30 PM, in the Multifunctional Room of Webster...
Rolf Potts returned to the Writers House recently and, after leading a public program he and I went into the Wexler Studio to record an episode of his fine podcast series, “Deviate.” It was a long interview. Even after some editing, it’s still 93 minutes long. You can listen to...
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.