Karen Rile wins Beltran Family Teaching Award

The following happy message has been sent to many friends of the Writers House:

I'm very pleased to announce the winner of the first annual Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House. She is Karen Rile, a super-devoted and extraordinarily talented teacher who has taught part-time as a member of the Creative Writing faculty for many years. She offers writing workshops in fiction and creative nonfiction, and year after year her students, in their evaluations and otherwise, give her the highest possible praise as mentor and supportive writerly presence. She has always gone way out of her way to help emergent writers. And she has long been a friend of the Kelly Writers House and a member of the KWH community. We are pleased that this award will provide her with a $1,000 stipend and up to $2,200 to spend on organizing and hosting a program at the Writers House in the coming academic year (2012-13).

We will be celebrating Karen as our first Beltran Award winner at our end-of-year "hub" party at the Writers House starting at 5 PM on Wednesday, April 25. We will honor her again at the program she sponsors next year.

If you know and share our admiration of Karen, please feel free to congratulate her on this honor: krile@writing.upenn.edu.

10 paid summer internships - RealArts@PENN

We received hundreds of applications again this year for ten paid summer RealArts@PENN internships. Below is a list of the students who have been appointed as RealArts interns for 2012.

For more about RealArts: CLICK HERE.

We want to thank Mingo Reynolds, who coordinates RealArts; and Anthony DeCurtis, Director of RealArts and creator of the series of RealArts events and symposia at the Kelly Writers House. We also wish to thank Dirk Wittenborn, Paul & Ossi Burger, & Alan Berger for their support of RealArts.

The quality of the applications was very high, the competition acute.

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Interning with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial blog "Say What?” will be Lalita Clozel. Lalita is a junior majoring in Philosophy and Economics.

Nadine Zylberberg will be interning at Original Film. Nadine is a Communication and Cinema Studies major, with a minor in French, and she is a writer for the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The intern at Philadelphia Magazine will be Eillie Anzilotti. Eillie is a junior concentrating in Creative Writing, and minoring in Fine Arts.

Natalia Fuller, a junior History of Art major who focuses in Contemporary Art, will be interning at The Jewish Museum this summer.

The intern at Viacom Creative Services (formerly MTV Creative Services) will be Jake Spinowitz. Jake is a junior and a Creative Writing student.

This years Rolling Stone magazine intern will be Joe Pinsker. Joe is a junior studying nonfiction and journalistic writing and is an editor at 34th Street.

Elaine Ogden, a junior majoring in English, will be working at Brooklyn Films in L.A. with producer/director Jon Avnet.

The intern at Nickelodeon Animation Studios will be Kirby Dixon. Kirby is a junior Visual Arts major with a minor in Spanish.

Tim Delaney will be working in L.A. with screenwriters David Stern and Stuart Gibbs. Tim is a junior English major with a focus in Cinema Studies, and he is also a Communications major.

The intern for Shore Fire Media is Greg Bonnem, a junior studying Communications and Hispanic Studies.

Anthony DeCurtis talks about Joy Division at 7-Up

At our annual 7-UP event, seven KWH friends talk for seven minutes each about a topic the community has chosen. This year the theme was "isolation." Here is a link to the web calendar entry, which provides a list of speakers and their topics. Here is a link to our web page on the whole 7-UP series.

Heled Grant enables KWH'ers to travel for research

Each year a student is awarded the Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant, which provides funding for one or several research trips so that the writer can prepare to write a major project. The winner presents his or her findings at an event during the fall after the research summer. Be sure to check out the previous winners and their projects at our Heled Research Grant page. Applications for this year's grant are during on Sunday, March 11. Pictured here (at left in the photo) is Emma Morgenstern, 2009-10 Heled winner. Her project was entitled: "Judeo-Spanish in Greece: The Dying Language of a Survivor Community."