Simone White named Assoc Faculty Director

Simone White, whose work as poet, teacher, art critic, theorist, and performer has achieved international recognition, has been named Associate Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. She has been closely affiliated with the Writers House since she joined the Penn faculty in 2018 and now joins Faculty Director Al Filreis, Director Jessica Lowenthal, and the staff, faculty, and students at 3805 Locust Walk in this new role.

As Associate Faculty Director, Professor White will work with her colleagues at the House to help develop new program series, focusing especially on interarts programming, encouraging the evolution of events and projects that benefit from the convergence of music, visual arts, poetics, sound studies, theory, and performance. With Professor Filreis she has taught the Kelly Writers House Fellows seminar—an annual program featuring three eminent writers who make extended visits to the House and to the class—and will continue to plan the visits of upcoming Fellows. With Filreis and others, she will participate in planning for the future of the Kelly Writers House as this uniquely capacious open house for writers on Penn’s campus prepares to celebrate its first thirty years in May 2026.

“Simone has already been an active and much admired member of the Writers House community,” writes Al Filreis. “Teaching the Writers House Fellows seminar with her has been a dream. She is a truly great poet, has both natural and deeply learned instincts as a project- and event-maker, and leads in the most collaborative and conscientious way.”

Simone White is the author of Warring (forthcoming from Duke University Press), or, on being the other woman (Duke University Press, 2022), Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and House Envy of All the World (Factory School, 2010), the poetry chapbook, Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, Dolly (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her poetry and prose have been featured in Artforum, e-flux, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, Poetry, and The New York Times, among other places. Her honors include the 2023 Dorothea Tanning Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Creative Capital Award, and a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, Professor White holds a JD from Harvard Law School, an MFA from the New School, and a PhD in English from CUNY Graduate Center. She was raised in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia, about which she has written compellingly especially in her most recent poems.

“It’s such an honor to help steward this completely singular institution,” notes Professor White. “The Writers House has a legacy of celebrating literature as a form of gathering together, an ethic I share as a teacher and a poet. I look forward to working with Al, Jessica, and the staff of Kelly Writers House to share our joy in studying and making literary art with students, the wider Penn and Philadelphia communities, and visitors from all over the world.”

Since joining Penn’s English department, Professor White has taught graduate and undergraduate literature courses on Writing about Music, What Is Poetics?, W.E.B. DuBois, and creative writing workshops on Poetry Writing and Experimental Writing. She currently holds the rank of Associate Professor. She has been a member of the Kelly Writers House Advisory Board since 2020.

New article about Wes Matthews

We here at 3805 Locust Walk are thrilled about a recent article describing and celebrating the talents and achievements of Wes Matthews. Please take a few moments to read the piece and be amazed!  HERE it is.

 

Kelly Writers House team builds virtual experience to engage 25 high schoolers in annual Summer Workshop for Young Writers

by Amanda Silberling, a 2018 Penn graduate and the Van Doren Engagement Fellow at both the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Institute of Contemporary Art

If you try to picture a writer and see a brooding figure typing alone in a dark room, think again. When I think about what it means to be a writer, I remember all the conversations I’ve shared in the Kelly Writers House kitchen at the University Pennsylvania, debating what kind of cookies to bake with the same ferocity that we would bring to our literature seminars. Like many creative students, Writers House shaped my Penn undergraduate experience, teaching me that writers thrive in community with one another. 

When I returned to Penn this year as the Van Doren Fellow, supporting student engagement in the arts, I was excited to teach in the Summer Workshop for Young Writers; I wanted to welcome a group of talented high school students into our expansive, supportive community, just like I had been welcomed years ago as a frazzled college freshman. I imagined greeting teenagers with wide eyes and heavy duffel bags, watching them chatter with nervous excitement as they filed into a circle of creaky, mismatched chairs in the Arts Cafe. I wanted to witness as these students developed the trusting, supportive friendships that generate thoughtful writing and reading. Of course, our summer didn’t unfold as we planned. 

In its three previous years, the Summer Workshop for Young Writers has been a 10-day residential program – needless to say, with the threat of coronavirus, there would be no shared dorm rooms, and no journeys to the Philadelphia International Airport. The Kelly Writers House team dedicated to planning the Summer Workshop included Jamie-Lee Josselyn (C’05), David Marchino (C’16), Izzy Lopez (C’19), James Chang (C’22), and myself (C '18). When we decided to move the workshop online, we had doubts, but we still felt motivated to provide a space for teens from across the country to write together. 

Once we determined that our students had reliable internet access, we spent weeks grappling with the same questions that educators across the world are weighing: how do you replicate the intimacy of a small seminar on Zoom? Can students bear to spend hours upon hours staring at a computer screen? Is online education as worthwhile or effective as in-person instruction? 

Since the Summer Workshop for Young Writers specializes in memoir writing, it’s essential that our high school students trust their cohort enough to be vulnerable in their personal essay assignments. Even for the most experienced writers, getting workshopped can be nerve-wracking, and for some students, this program would be their first experience giving and receiving critique. To build a trusting classroom community via Zoom, you need to think outside the box – so, it’s a good thing that writers know a thing or two about creativity. 

The shared strangeness of participating in an online summer workshop became a bonding experience in itself: some students wore matching cowboy hats; others showed off their pets, or virtually cheers-ed with their cans of LaCroix. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of our Zoom classroom was the chat box – while some teachers might find this akin to texting in class, the Zoom chat opens up channels of communication that don’t exist in the traditional classroom. During discussions of assigned reading, in addition to communicating verbally, students could type in brief observations, witty jokes, questions to revisit, or quotes from fellow students – it functioned like a live broadcast of students’ immediate reactions to new concepts or texts. This deepened the students’ engagement, as well as their connections with one another. 

After three-hour memoir seminars in the morning, students would return after their break for a variety of craft sessions, topics ranging from comedy writing with Alina Graboswki (C’16) to literary collage with Professor Karen Rile (C’80). Over the course of our 10 days and many long hours on Zoom, our 25 students completed three new pieces of memoir writing, which they presented live on a YouTube broadcast. 

Inspired by the work of Joe Brainard, we asked the students to write “I remember” statements about their experience in our online workshop – I think their reflections speak for themselves. 

I remember cats walking across the keyboard, cats napping in the background, cats napping on the couch. 

I remember talking to my parents for hours on end about how much fun I was having. I finally found other teens who cared about writing just as much as I did. 

 I remember when Larry got a haircut and everyone went wild. 

 I remember wishing I could meet everyone in real life one day. 

I remember forcing myself not to be scared to ask to be included – and I think it’s paid off. 

I’ll state the obvious: teaching creative writing on Zoom isn’t ideal. But, the best teachers I’ve had have been ones who can adapt to challenging circumstances, and in turn, show us that it’s possible to mitigate conflict with creative solutions. For me, this is always what has made Writers House such a special place: it encourages students to explore their weirdest, wildest ideas, despite any limitations (Where else would you encounter a “meta chair”?). Though our 25 high school writers may not have been able to bake in the kitchen, nap on the beanbag, or marvel at our extensive collection of signed books, they still managed to build community despite the difficult circumstances.

A message from Al & Jessica

A message sent by Al Filreis & Jessica Lowenthal to the Writers House community:

We unequivocally support justice for those murdered and brutalized by police: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and countless others. We unequivocally support justice for those lynched by civilians: Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and countless others.

Anything we might say in this time of rage, despair, and mourning would be inadequate and incommensurate as a response to these deaths, especially because so many members of our community are in pain and there is so much work to do. But we do want to state a few things simply and plainly:

We firmly now and always stand against racial injustice, inequality, and police brutality.

We resolutely affirm that Black lives matter.

And we are committed as always to amplifying the ideas and voices of our community, many of whom are engaged daily in the necessary work of change. That is what the Writers House was founded to do nearly 25 years ago and now more than ever we consciously intend to honor that mission.

We’re putting together a livestream event on Monday, June 15 at 6:00 PM that will feature some of our community members sharing thoughts, writing, and reflection. We’ll send more info soon. Meantime, please put that date and time in your calendar and we hope you’ll plan to participate.

And in the coming days, weeks, and months we plan to use outreach methods the Kelly Writers House has created and extended over the years — connecting a strong network of artists, writers, teachers, students, citizens — to share readings, writings, ideas, resources, and projects that provide urgently needed information, challenge racist assumptions and structures, might bring comfort, and are otherwise relevant to this extraordinarily difficult time. Here, for now, we share a few links, as recommended by some of our community members.

We hope you will join us in this effort by sending us links to and information about some of the projects, readings, ventures, stories, and work that you find important and relevant right now. We will share what we can with our networks via email and social media. Send your notes and suggestions to whresources@writing.upenn.edu .

Please click HERE for the full statement and the links posted on June 3.

COVID-19 UPDATE

To help protect the community from the spread of COVID-19, in accordance with the University of Pennsylvania’s guidelines and the CDC, and to protect our community, Kelly Writers House will be closed until further notice. 

We encourage you to follow us here and on social media for news of digital events, and to take time to explore our archive of recorded material. Resources include PennSound and Medialinks. 

If you are a prospective student looking to learn more about Kelly Writers House, please contact Jamie-Lee Josselyn.

KWH Post-Bacc Fellow 2019-20: Maya Arthur

We are thrilled to announce that MAYA ARTHUR (C’18) has been selected as the inaugural Kelly Writers House Post-Baccalaureate Fellow. The KWH Post-Bacc Fellows project extends a central objective of the Writers House: to direct resources toward opportunities, learning experiences, and foundational support for young writers. The position comes with a full year of support (a full-time salary, mentorship, and career-boosting learning opportunities). During the course of her fellowship, Maya will pursue a year-long, self-directed creative project, working closely with Professor Simone White, who has been named her faculty mentor. She will also work several hours a week at Writers House, where she will learn about PennSound and Jacket2, and will assist with public events. Here’s more about Maya: Maya is a writer and novice archivist/artist/researcher. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. During her time at Penn, she gardened in graves, started a zine library, discussed witches at length, and ate as much Fu Wah banh mi as she could. Her senior year thesis was titled "Comma, Virginia," a collection of poetry that sought to find cohesion through the collision and estrangement of genre, perspective, and mobility. In her thesis, she focused on the intricacies and history of her father's family and the small, rural town they are from and still reside. She is currently based in New York but is so excited to come back to the Writers House community. Through the KWH Post-Bacc Fellowship, she hopes to expand her thesis into a multimedia project that explores creating one's own archive. She is a 2019 Lambda Poetry Fellow. More information about the KWH Post-Bacc Fellows Program is available here: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/postbaccfellow/ . We’re excited to see what Maya will do! Please join us in congratulating her.

Your Language My Ear

Join us for Your Language My Ear! Click HERE for more info. This program is a translation symposium that brings together Russian and American poets, along with American scholars, translators and students of Russian poetry, for intensive translation of contemporary poetry from Russian to English and vice versa at the University of Pennsylvania. The third YLME symposium is scheduled for March 13-March 20 and will include events at Princeton University, our partner institution. Our guests for this iteration of the symposium include: Polina Barskova, Dmitry Kuzmin, Elena Mikhailik, Galina Rymbu, and Leonid Schwab. For more information, visit the project website.