Leonard Schwartz here this week

Poet and host of the great radio program, "Cross Cultural Poetics," Leonard Schwartz will be visiting the Writers House this Thursday. He will give a reading at the Writers House at 7 PM. For more details, click here. About his work Richard Foreman has written: "Leonard Schwartz's poems rip apart the organizations of language and experience, allowing those separate realms to collide in ways that give a new electricity to both. His writing is the strongest possible example of a contemporary poetry that makes thought into something sensual, something caressable, enlacing with the reader's lust for those parts of his mind into which he hasn't yet ecstatically tumbled."

Cuban poetry on 9/30/10

Mark Weiss has edited Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, an anthology given the title The Whole Island. published recently by UC Press. We're bringing Mark to the Writers House for an event on September 30. Here's an audio announcement about it. The anthology includes several poems by Jose Lezama Lima and a few others from the so-called "Origenes" group.

we are one of the things you must do before graduating

We were featured in 34th Street Magazine's "Top 50 Things You Must Do Before You Graduate," as follows:

"15. Go to a Speakeasy at the Kelly Writers House (3805 Locust Walk) and meet some of Penn’s most talented poets and a handful of West Philadelphia’s biggest weirdos. Or hang out there any other time — there’s guaranteed to be some good food for the taking in the kitchen. And who knows, you might run into the likes of Joan Didion, Art Spiegelman or Maury Povich (Proud Penn alum!)."

Here's your link to the original. In the photo at left: Art Spiegelman at the Writers House in 2008.

online book groups announced

The Writers House today announced its new slate of online discussion groups for Penn alumni and parents of Penn students. Here's the new roster. Two members of the tenured English faculty - Jim English and Emily Steiner - will each lead groups. Janine Catalano, a former Writers House regulsr, leads a group on writing about food, while Chris Mustazza will moderate a discussion of anonymity and the internet. Al Filreis and Jamie-Lee Josselyn will give folks a foretaste of Edward Albee, prior to his visit next spring as a Writers House Fellow.

Cheever - Albee - Perloff

Our 2011 Kelly Writers House Fellows are featured on the main news page of the Penn web site. Neither Susan Cheever nor Edward Albee have visited the Writers House before. Marjorie Perloff has visited us several times. During one visit she gave a talk on O'Hara, Johns and Cage and PennSound makes available the recording of that lecture.

video of winner of fiction prize

Sanae Lemoine won first place in the annual Creative Writing fiction-writing contest. Click here to watch a 6-minute video recording of Greg Djanikian's introduction and Sanae's reading from her work. Click here and see the KWH web page calendar entry for this event, and from there you'll see links to full recordings, both video and audio, of the entire program - not just Sanae but the other winners as well. Everyone at the Writers House congratulates Sanae on this achievement.

2010-2011 ArtsEdge Resident

The Kelly Writers House and Facilities and Real Estate Services (FRES) of the University of Pennsylvania are excited to announce the recipient of the 2010-2011 ArtsEdge Residency: New York City-based poet and author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

ArtsEdge is a collaborative residency project designed to encourage the careers of emergent writers. Residencies last for one year and include an apartment, studio space in the AIR Space artistic nexus on 40th street, and close affiliation with Penn's writing communities. ArtsEdge aims to support the work of emerging writers, to foster an environment that will inspire innovative writing, and to enrich West Philadelphia by encouraging young writers to live and work here.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is the author of the non-fiction book Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press, 2008) -- which we featured for the 2008 Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program. She's also written five books of poetry, most recently Everything is Everything (Write Bloody Press, 2010). Cristin's work has appeared in a wide variety of places including McSweeney’s Internet Tendancies, Rattle, Conduit, Barrelhouse, Pank, decomP, kill author, and La Petite Zine. She lives in New York City, where she helps run the NYC-Urbana Poetry series at the Bowery Poetry Club.