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.

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.