Family Weekend. Another moment for realizing how long I’ve been doing this work and how deep & sustained many of my relationships are. Here I am yesterday with Rachel, who was my student and advisee in the early 1990s, and Josh, her son, who is currently my student and my...
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...
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...
Today in “Representations of the Holocaust” we discussed Spiegelman’s Maus and were visited by the family of one of the students (including her survivor grandmother) and also by Diane & Jerry Rothenberg. It was an intense session and ended with Jerry’s preface to Khurbn in which he turns around Adorno’s...
The amazing group of people who formed the KWH Fellows Seminar for spring 2017 met for a final time last night—our “final words” session. Here are some photos I took of the gang. Click on any image for a larger view.
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.