happy birthday

Today we celebrated Michelle Taransky's birthday at the Writers House. Sarah Arkebauer whipped up some of her delicious cupcakes, aptly decorated with various Taranskyisms, and of course there were various forms of glitter all around. Michelle, who was not surprised by the little party, went around with her best surprise face on. Happy birthday, Michelle!

Burt Kimmelman is here Tuesday at 6 PM

Poet BURT KIMMELMAN will be reading at the Writers House on Tuesday, October 26, at 6:00 PM. A professor of English at NJIT, he has been called “a successor to the lineage of William Carlos Williams and George Oppen” by Jerome Rothenberg, as well a projector of “great possibility” in his latest collection, As If Free. Please help us welcome Mr. KIMMELMAN, who’ll be introduced by our own Al Filreis!

Burt has published six collections of poetry – As If Free (Talisman House, Publishers, 2009), There Are Words (Dos Madres Press, 2007), Somehow (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (Jensen/Daniels Publishing, 2000), and Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (Peter Lang Publishing, 1996; paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (Facts on File, 2005) and co- edited The Facts on File Companion to American Poetry (Facts on File, 2007). He has published scores of essays on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry.

nonsense is okay to us

Our colleagues at PennSound have segmented a reading by Ray DiPalma. It took place on November 10, 1977, and he read with Michael Lally and Bruce Andrews. He read four pieces. One of them, very short, begins "It makes of nonsense..." We think it's quite compelling. Listen yourself and decide. We at 3805 Locust don't mind nonsense. In fact, it makes our day.

PennSound on YouTube

In this video clip, watch and hear Juliana Spahr read from her work, "The Incinerator." The clip is 8 minutes long and was prepared for our PennSound YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/pennsound. There are now 118 videos uploaded to PennSound on YouTube. They range from David Antin rethinking Freud to Kaegan Sparks introducing Christian Bok to John Yau talking with Charles Bernstein.

Max Apple wins major prize

Max Apple--long a member of the Writers House community--has won a 2010 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. The Pew site says this: "Pew Fellowships in the Arts (PFA) was established by The Pew Charitable Trusts in 1991, and annually awards up to 12 fellowships of $60,000 to artists of exemplary talent in the five-county Philadelphia area. The goal of PFA is to assist the region’s most talented artists in furthering and innovating their work by awarding substantial financial support accompanied by a set of customized, focused professional- and career-development resources." For more, check out the Pew site. We at KWH all send our congrats to Max! Check out this interview with Max.

students of Greg Djanikian read their poems

At the end of each semester, students in various writing workshops perform their new writings from the podium of the Writers House. Their classmates get to hear them in a quasi-formal setting present their semester's efforts, but of course friends, family and members of the KWH community get to see and hear them too. Great way to finish the term. Of course we record all this and then carefully index the audio and video files by the name. Click on the video player above and left and you'll get to watch Greg Djanikian's advanced poetry writing class present their poems. (We're boasting these days about our new nifty video media player - embeddable at various sizes. This is not a YouTube video; it's housed right at home, at Penn, on our own media server. Thanks to Mark Lindsay for his programming magic and to the School of Arts & Sciences for collaborating with us as always.)

Howard Fineman offers mini-course

The Writers House will be hosting a mini-course taught by Howard Fineman on political nonfiction. The University of Pennsylvania Current today features a story about this project. "One of the most basic structural problems with the curriculum is the idea of the semester,” says Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and one of the founders of the Writers House. “It often prevents us from engaging brilliant people in the extended Penn community who would be great teachers and mentors of our students but, because they are geographically far-flung and in the world of everyday practice, a semester-long course is impossible. So, I'm thrilled that through the Writers House we can create mini-courses and that someone like Howard Fineman can actually teach our students, despite his otherwise crazy schedule." Here is your link to the article.