October 2014

Wednesday, 10/1

Tender Buttons at 100

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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In honor of the 100th anniversary of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, published in a corrected centennial edition by City Lights Books this year, Julia Bloch and Laynie Browne invited a number of poets—Lee Ann Brown, Ryan Eckes, Charles Bernstein, Jason Mitchell, Angela Carr, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis—to read from Stein's text and speak about its influence, its origins and its legacy. First published in 1914 in a print run of 1,000 by Claire Marie, Tender Buttons has come to be understood as one of the most important and challenging texts of twentieth-century literary modernism, what Charles Bernstein has called "the fullest realization of the turn to language and the most perfect realization of 'wordness,' where word and object are merged."

Lee Ann Brown is the author of In the Laurels, Caught, Crowns of Charlotte, The Sleep That Changed Everything and Polyverse. She is founder and editor of Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She teaches at St. John’s University, curates the Page Poetry Parlor, and she directs the French Broad Institute (of Time & the River).

Angela Carr is a poet and translator. She is the author of three poetry books, most recently Here in There (BookThug 2014). Originally from Montréal, Angela now lives in New York City, and teaches creative writing at The New School.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis' work includes the "last" volume of Drafts, Surge: Drafts 96-114, a new volume of poetry, Interstices, and the critical book Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.

Ryan Eckes is the author of Valu-Plus, Old NewsSugar Mule, The Rumpus, OnandOnScreen, and on his blog at ryaneckes.blogspot.com.

Jason Mitchell's poems have appeared in Hi Zero, Stolen Island, Court Green, Jupiter 88 and elsewhere. He hosts and coordinates the Philadelphia reading series Frank O'Hara's Last Lover in the Rose Room at Snockey's Oyster & Crab House.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee's books include That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, and the forthcoming Solar Maximum. A 2013 Pew Fellow in the Arts, she writes reviews for The Constant Critic and edits Corollary Press.

Charles Bernstein's most recent book is Recalculating. Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn.

Laynie Browne is a 2014 Pew Fellow in the arts and author of ten collections of poetry, most recently Lost Parkour Psalms. Forthcoming are two collections, Scorpyn Odes and P R A C T I C E.

Thursday, 10/2

Friday, 10/3

Saturday, 10/4

Sunday, 10/5

Monday, 10/6

Graduate Journalism Program Info Session

Medill School of Journalism (Northwestern University, Chicago)

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Find out more about the Medill School of Journalism, through a conversation with Medill Associate Professor Peter Slevin, who will give an overview of the Medill journalism program and take audience questions.

Medill’s graduate journalism program immerses students in practical, hands–on experience that, since 1921, has produced some of the world’s finest journalists and storytellers. Medill trains its students to use the latest digital tools, while allowing them to focus on a subject–area reporting specialty: sports, social justice, global, business, or health & science. During the 12-month program, students will have the opportunity to report from Medill's newsrooms in Chicago and Washington, D.C., plus the option to spend a fifth quarter participating in a Global Residency program.

Gillian Conoley and Kathryn Pringle

Whenever We Feel Like It poetry reading

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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Gillian Conoley was born in Austin Texas, where, on its rural outskirts, her father and mother owned and operated a radio station. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Peace, The Plot Genie, Profane Halo, Lovers in the Used World, and Tall Stranger, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Her poems have been anthologized widely, most recently in W.W. Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry, Norton’s American Hybrid, and Best American Poetry. A poet, editor, and translator, Conoley has taught as a visiting writer at University of Denver, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulane University, and Vermont College. Her translations of three books by Henri Michaux will appear in City Lights Pocket Poets series this year. Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Kathryn L. Pringle is the author of Temper & Felicity are Lovers (forthcoming 2014). fault tree (Omnidawn, 2011), RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY (Factory School, 2009) & The Stills (Duration Press, 2006). A new book, Obscenity for the Advancement of Poetry, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2017.

Tuesday, 10/7

Speakeasy Open Mic

7:30 in the Arts Cafe

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Our Speakeasy Open Mic Night is held once a month. We invite writers to share their work, or the work of others, in our Arts Cafe. Speakeasy welcomes all kinds of readings, performances, spectacles, and happenings. Bring your poetry, your guitar, your dance troupe, your award-winning essay, or your stand up comedy to share. You should expect outrageous (and free!) raffles for things you didn't know you needed, occasional costumes, and, of course, community members who love writing.

Wednesday, 10/8

Thursday, 10/9

Friday, 10/10

Saturday, 10/11

Sunday, 10/12

Monday, 10/13

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

From the time of its founding in 1995-1996, the Kelly Writers House has been run more or less collectively by members of its community. Our original team of intrepid founders—the group of students, faculty, alumni, and staff who wanted to create an independent haven for writers and supporters of contemporary writing in any genre—took for themselves the name “the hub.” “Hub” was the generic term given by Penn's Provost, President, and other planners who hoped that something very innovative would be done at 3805 Locust Walk to prove the viability of the idea that students, working with others, could create an extracurricular learning community around common intellectual and creative passions. To this day, the Writers House Planning Committee refers to itself as “the hub”—the core of engaged faculty, student, staff, and alumni volunteers from whom the House's creative energy and vitality radiates.

Tuesday, 10/14

Ball for Cecilia Corrigan’s Titanic

Hosted by Leopold Brant

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Cecilia Corrigan's performances have been exhibited at MOMA, The New Museum, CAGE Gallery, as well as Brown, Yale, and the University of Iowa. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Mousse Magazine, The Capilano Review, LUMINA Journal, The Claudius App, The Journal, and The Henry Review, among others. Her book Titanic received the Madeleine P Plonsker Emerging Writer's Prize, and will be released this fall. Her chapbook True Beige was published in 2013 by Trafficker Press. She is also a comedian and screenwriter, having previously written for HBO.

Leopold Brant is a budding fashion designer, whose talents have been profiled in Interview Magazine, Art in America, and Modern Magazine. He will be the first in-house fashion designer for the Andy Warhol Museum in 2015. His recent salon series, ‘White,’ has hosted such luminaries as John Ashbery, Harold Bloom, David Joselitt, Adam Fitzgerald, and James Franco. His first chapbook The Dandyisms of Leopold Brant, will be released by ‘Marc by Marc Books’ with a simultaneous ‘bootleg’ edition appearing on Gauss PDF. Ryan McNamara placed ’Dandyisms‘ in his Top 10 Things of 2013 in Next Magazine, praising the book for being “so epically performative, maybe the most performative thing ever to be put to paper. Challenges every institution and yet is also so sweet and heartfelt. I only can hope more poetry will come out that references this much everyday queer experience from Lana Del Ray to Masion Keyser!” The New York Times recently dubbed him and his brother Haierie, “the new princes of New York,” and in Artforum, Christopher Glazek has praised their style for being the “most beautiful contemporary incarnation of queer melancholia...a radically feminist post-Internet stab in patriarchal authority's back.” In 2016, he will be launching a new effort, in conjunctions with the True Colors charity organization, that will award the ‘John Ashbery's couch award’ to twelve creative homeless queer youth every year. This award gives poets the chance to sit on Ashbery's couch, and to study his every move and take notes! John, himself, will pick the poet he likes the best and blurb their first book, which True Colors will publish vis-a-vis their poetry tumblr poetrybytrucecolors.tumblr.com. He will also be debuting a new line of his signature Frank O'Hara yachts at the Frank O'Hara Fire Island Reading Group this summer.

Wednesday, 10/15

Lunch with Politico Editor John Harris

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Dick Polman

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A reading by Lance Olsen

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative writing, including three published this year: the novel based on Robert Smithson's earthwork the Spiral Jetty, Theories of Forgetting; How to Unfeel the Dead: New & Selected Fictions; and [[ there. ]], a trash-diary meditation on the confluence of travel, curiosity, and aesthetic/existential experimentation. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeney’s and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D., N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as chair of the Board of Directors at the independent press Fiction Collective Two, now in its 40th year making fiction making trouble.

Thursday, 10/16

Edible Books Party

A Creative Ventures Project

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Our Edible Book Party will celebrate works of art inspired by books and created in kitchens. All are welcome to join the festival, to browse the library of edible titles, or to contribute their own. Edible books could show up as depictions of literary characters or scenes, interpretations of titles or themes, or sculptures of actual books. Prizes will be awarded in a variety of categories.

Friday, 10/17

Saturday, 10/18

Sunday, 10/19

Monday, 10/20

The Foreign Fork: A food tour with Chase Matecun

6:30 PM in the Arts Cafe

Penn student Chase Matecun (W'17) is an avid food-lover, travel enthusiast, chef, and Spanish-speaker. He was born and raised in a small midwestern town called Hudson, Ohio, but there’s nothing he loves more than a piping hot plate of grilled squid drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice. Through a Creative Ventures Capital Grant, Chase spent the summer of 2014 eating his way though Spain and the Mediterranean—sampling the full spectrum of traditional local foods and then blogging about it. Join us for culinary tour!

Tuesday, 10/21

A conversation with poet Bernadette Mayer

Special ModPo webcast

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Bernadette Mayer is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School. Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing, though she is also known for her work with form and mythology. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci, and, until 1983, United Artists books and magazines with Lewis Warsh. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project, and her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely, with writers like Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman having sat in on her workshops.

Bernadette Mayer & Philip Good

A poetry reading

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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Bernadette Mayer is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School. Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing, though she is also known for her work with form and mythology. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci, and, until 1983, United Artists books and magazines with Lewis Warsh. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project, and her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely, with writers like Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman having sat in on her workshops.

Philip Good studied poetry at the St. Marks Poetry Project and Naropa University. He is a graduate of The School Visual Arts in Manhattan. Besides his work as a poet Good has published articles in the New York Times. In the 80s Good co-edited with Bill DeNoyelles Blue Smoke, the last of the mimeo poetry magazines. Good’s poetry is published in various small press magazines, including: Pome, Oblek, Bombay Gin, Cover, Brown Box, and Holy Tomato. His work can be found online with BigBridge, Exquisite Corpse, Tool and The Volta. His self-published books include, Drunken Bee Poems, Corn, Passion Come Running and Coffee Poems. His new book UNTITLED WRITINGS FROM A MEMBER OF THE BLANK GENERATION by Trembling Pillow Press, New Orleans, has been praised by Lisa Jarnot and Michael Gizzi. Michael Gizzi said of Untitled Writings the “100 poems, maybe more—should have appeared a hundred moons ago.” Lisa Jarnot said, “An old friend comes to visit and keeps you up far past your bedtime. The conversation is joyously animated. The gossip is gentle. Curious questions waltz through the room. Who unleashed this light in the darkness? Philip Good, of course.”

Wednesday, 10/22

Covering the Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Are We Having Fun Yet?

Tom Fitzgerald, John Baer, & Dick Polman

12:00 PM in the Arts Café

sponsored by: Povich Journalism Program

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Many observers say that the race between Gov. Tom Corbett and Democrat Tom Wolf has been a snore, but what’s it like to cover it from the inside—and to compete 24/7 with all the new media outlets and technologies?

Thomas Fitzgerald, chief political writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is currently tracking the race for governor of Pennsylvania. He covered the last four presidential campaigns for the paper, where he also was a reporter in Philadelphia’s City Hall and a state capital correspondent. Earlier, Fitzgerald has worked for The Bergen (N.J.) Record and The New Orleans Times-Picayune. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from The University of Michigan.

John M. Baer, a political columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News, is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and a founding member and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club. He authored the 2012 book, On the Front Lines of Pennsylvania Politics: Twenty-Five Years of Keystone Reporting (The History Press). A graduate of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, he holds a Masters Degree from Temple University.

Emi Gennis

Brodsky Gallery opening

6:00 PM

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Emi Gennis is a cartoonist and illustrator from the Midwest. Her often macabre historical and true crime comics have appeared in several online and print publications, including Irene, The Cartoon Picayune, Bitch Magazine, and The Hairpin. She has also produced comics journalism for The Nib and Symbolia. Gennis is the editor of Unknown Origins & Untimely Ends, an anthology of nonfiction mystery comics (Hic & Hoc Publications, 2013). Her work appeared in the 2013 documentary Oregon Experience: Portland Noir, produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. in Sequential Art from the Savannah College of Art & Design. Gennis currently resides in southeastern Kansas where she teaches art at Pittsburg State University. Her work can be found at emigennis.com.

Thursday, 10/23

A conversation with Megan McArdle

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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Megan McArdle is a journalist who covers economics, business, and public policy, with an occasional foray into kitchen gadgets. Her writing has appeared in The Economist, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Businessweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and a number of other outlets. Ms. McArdle has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She lives in Washington DC.

Friday, 10/24

Saturday, 10/25

Sunday, 10/26

Monday, 10/27

Postcolonial digital humanities

A conversation with Roopika Risam & Al Filreis

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

sponsored by: Creative Ventures

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Roopika Risam (C'03) is Assistant Professor of World Literature and English Education at Salem State University. Her research examines intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies, and the role of digital humanities in mediating between the two. Her co-written book Postcolonial Digital Humanities is under contract with Northwestern UP and she is also working on a manuscript that positions W.E.B. Du Bois as a progenitor for postcolonial studies through renewed attention to his literary work. Her digital scholarship includes The Harlem Shadows Project, on producing critical editions of public domain texts; Postcolonial Digital Humanities, an online community dedicated to global explorations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability within cultures of technology; and Digitizing Chinese Englishmen, an experiment in postcolonial digital archival practices that examines the role of empire in 19th century digital scholarship in English. She is currently developing the prototype for A Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness, an interactive database and digital map that traces representations of blackness across temporality and geography. Her work has appeared in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology and is forthcoming in First Monday, Left History, and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry.

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the Kelly Writers House and WXPN FM (88.5). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc.

Tuesday, 10/28

the art of translation

Daniel Epstein, Mark Rudman, David Slavitt, Taije Silverman

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

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Daniel Mark Epstein is a biographer, poet, dramatist, and translator whose work has been widely published and performed. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1948, he was educated at Kenyon College. In the 1970s his poetry first appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic. His first volume of poems was published by Liveright in 1973. His plays appeared soon thereafter in regional theater and Off-Broadway, and in 1978 he received the Prix de Rome for his poetry and dramatic works. In the 1980s he wrote his first biography, Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson, now in its fourth printing. His biography Nat King Cole was a 1999 New York Times Notable Book, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and his biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay was a New York Public Library Honoree, “Books to Remember” for 2001. The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by both The Wall Street Journal and The Chicago Sun-Times. He has a working knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and ancient Greek and his translations include The Trinummus of Plautus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), The Bacchae of Euripides (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and Chimeres of Gerard de Nerval, a sequence of poems that were published in the New Criterion in 2000. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1974, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, and an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

Mark Rudman is a poet, translator, and critic. His books of poetry include the five that form the Rider Quintet: Sundays on the Phone (2005), The Couple (2002), Provoked in Venice (1999), Millennium Hotel (1996), and Rider (1994), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The critically acclaimed quintet was made available as a five-volume set by Wesleyan University Press in 2009. In addition to his own poetry, Rudman has published critical prose and highly acclaimed translations, notably of the Boris Pasternak, Znigbiew Herbert, and Bohdan Antonych. His translation of Pasternak's My Sister-Life (1983) won the Columbia Translation Center's Max Hayward Award; many of his translations appear in both Twentieth Century French Poetry and Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. His critical work includes Robert Lowell and the Poetic Act (2007) and Diverse Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry(2009). His many critical essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and the London Review of Books. He is editor-in-chief of Pequod, an international literary journal, and the recipient of awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. He lives in New York with his wife and son, and teaches poetry at New York University.

David R. Slavitt was educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia. He was a writer at Newsweek where he reviewed books and movies. He has taught at Penn, Columbia, Princeton, and Bennington, among other places. He has published more than 110 books, including poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and reportage, but he is probably best known as a translator—from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Among his translations are such works as the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the Theban plays of Sophocles, the Other Four Plays of Sophocles, Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, the sonnets and short poems of Petrarch, and such lesser known texts as the fables of Avianus, poems of Ausonius, The Voyage of the Argo of Valerius Flaccus, and João Pinto Delgado’s Poem of Queen Esther. His rendition of “From the Fragrant East” by Pietro Bembo is forthcoming this fall. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife and two cats.

Wednesday, 10/29

A conversation with John Leguizamo

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

John Leguizamo is a multi-faceted performer and Emmy Award winner, who has established a career that defies categorization. With boundless and visceral creativity, his work in film, theatre, television, and literature covers a variety of genres, continually threatening to create a few of its own. Screenwriting credits include Fugly, Freak, and Spic-O-Rama — and he’s written for stage too. As an actor, he’s known for his extraordinary range (Super Mario Brothers and Shakespeare), for his voice work, and his energetic, one-man shows. This year alone Leguizamo completed production on Universal Pictures’ The Nest, opposite Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the Lionsgate action comedy, American Ultra, with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, Atlas Independent’s The Man on Carrion Road, opposite Patrick Wilson and Jim Belushi, and in Meadowland alongside Olivia Wilde.

Thursday, 10/30

TV producer Rene Balcer

RealArts@Penn program

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

hosted by: Anthony DeCurtis

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Rene Balcer is a former journalist and documentary filmmaker best known for producing, writing, and showrunning the hit television series Law & Order and its spin-off series Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which he also created. He also wrote for the series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and penned three made-for-television movies, one of which, Out on the Edge (1990), won the American Psychological Association Award of Excellence. He has won four Edgar Awards, a Peabody Award, the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America, and two Silver Gavel Awards. Balcer has lectured widely about writing, art, and the duties of artists in free societies, notably at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, the Sorbonne (Paris), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Canadian Film Centre (Toronto), Deauville American Film Festival, Banff World Media Festival, Monte Carlo TV Festival, International Ukiyo-e Society (Tokyo), and SPAA Conference (Brisbane).

Friday, 10/31