Maury Povich (C'62) donates $1M to KWH

As many friends of KWH already know, Maury Povich (a Penn alum, class of '62) has made a very generous donation of $1 million - to endow the Povich Fund for Journalism Programs at the Kelly Writers House. We invest an endowment gift and spend only the interest, which will defray the costs of our events having to do with journalistic writing every year forever. We are thrilled, and we are honored by Maury's belief that we are worth this major expression of philanthropy. Previously Maury and his wife Connie Chung endowed a faculty position in Creative Writing, the Povich Writer-in-Residence position--which is held by the wonderful Dick Polman. Recently the Huffington Post ran a little piece about the gift and here is a link to that.

Kelly Diamond makes a TV show

Kelly Diamond wanted to make a TV series, set at Penn and written, acted, directed and produced by students. Of course the Writers House was willing to help host and support the project. Recently the Pennsylvania Gazette ran a nice article about Kelly's first forays into making TV. You can find the article here. At the end of the piece you'll read this: "Diamond is only a sophomore, but if you ask [Al] Filreis where she’s headed he doesn’t hesitate. 'There’s no doubt she’s going to L.A. or New York, and she’s going to write for television. No doubt in my mind. And I’m excited about that, because that’s what she was born to do.'"

Jacket2, "pretty much the most robust place"

In the new issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, we find a nice article about Jacket2 by Sam Hughes. Here's an excerpt, quoting J2 publisher Al Filreis:

“The poetry world is huge, vibrant, full of odd and interesting and brilliant people all over the world—and they follow everything in the field. So while it might seem like the announcement of a change in a magazine is not going to rock anybody’s world, it did. There was a big response to it, and almost all of it positive.”

Jacket2 is going to be “pretty much the most robust place where you can look and find stuff about poetry—modern, contemporary; particularly contemporary,” he adds. Including, of course, poems. He describes it as a “fully integrated site” that will play off the raw material of spoken poetry provided by PennSound. “Between the two, we’ll have a whole lot covered.”

And here is a link to the whole article.

apprenticeships

Not long ago, an issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette included a story about our apprenticeships program. Here are a few paragraphs:

The apprenticeship program began taking shape in 2002, when faculty member and novelist Max Apple approached Al Filreis, the director of the Kelly Writer’s House. Apple had been at work on a short-story collection, and was looking for a fresh reader who could offer some perspective on how to organize it. “I thought, we’ll call this an apprenticeship, and we’ll put the word out about it,” says Filreis.

Then he went one step further. He decided to form a new program, and found two other faculty members working on their own projects who could use some help. As soon as word got out, “the students applied in droves,” he recalls. “They wanted this.”

After all, this sort of real world “lab experience” is already available to students in the hard sciences. “Typically, the physics student realizes that his own professor is actually working on some very important, cutting-edge research,” he says, and from that point there’s a well-defined path for the student trying to get from the classroom to doing advanced research in a working lab. The apprenticeship model provides the missing link for a writing student trying to make the leap from an undergrad workshop class to the professional craft. “I think with this program we’ve proved … there is such a thing as advanced research experiences in the world of writing,” he says.

By establishing the Bassini Apprenticeships under the umbrella of CPCW, these courses could become credit bearing, says Filreis. The center is devoted to pedagogy that “really works” for the education of young writers, including experiences that might not necessarily take place inside a traditional classroom. “We believe very firmly that students learn best when they are essentially getting a one-on-one experience,” Filreis says, a philosophy that he compares to the intimate size of the Kelly Writer’s House. The largest room can barely hold a few dozen audience members, and “more often it’s one person talking to five people,” he says. “Narrow that down to its extreme, it’s one person talking to one person.”

KWH on YouTube

Subscribe to the Kelly Writers House YouTube channel. It's been there for a while, but in the past six or seven months we'be been adding a slew of video clips from a selection of our programs. Click here and click "subscribe." Of course the best way to enjoy recorded KWH events is by watching full videos on "KWH-TV Reruns" - here. Or by going to the KWH web calendar, finding the event that interests you, and clicking on links to audio and video recordings. But we do realize that many people, if not most, go to YouTube reflexively to find video--and we want to be there too. Much of the work on the KWH YouTube channel has been done by our own Amaris Cuchanski. (Amaris has helped us build up the PennSound YouTube channel as well.)

Susan Cheever

Susan Cheever just a little while ago left the Writers House, where she'd spent two days with us as our first of three Writers House Fellows for 2011. Penn's student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, covered last night's event - a reading/talk given by Susan mostly about her biography of Louisa May Alcott. Here is that article. In it you see Susan Cheever quoted as saying that she'd been so moved and impressed by the Writers House--the people and the place--that it felt as if she'd died in a car crash and awakened in heaven. Pretty heavy stuff. Very soon the video and audio recordings of the two public events will be available.

new jewish writing, coming up

[At right: Rivka Fogel]. Join on us Thursday, February 24, for New Jewish Writing featuring Shahar Bram, Jessica Greenbaum, Bob Perelman, and Rivka Fogel (C'11) at 6:00 PM in our Arts Cafe. This program is sponsored by Zeek: a Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, the Jewish Studies Program, and Writers Without Borders. Here's a profile of one of the presenters: Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn where she lives, finally. A graduate of Barnard College and an initiating graduate of the University of Houston's Writing Program, she has worked as a business reporter for Forbes Magazine, a researcher for The Anti-Defamation League's Civil Rights Division, an English Dept adjunct, and as an editor for a magazine-on-tape for people who are visually impaired. She is presently the chief domestic scientist for a family of husband and two teenage girls, and poetry editor of the Massachusetts based annual, upstreet. Her first book, Inventing Difficulty, won the Gerald Cable Prize, and poems from her second manuscript have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Torah: A Woman's Commentary, CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Nextbook and . . . ZEEK. She is the founder of Foot Traffic Presents, which sells home-made muffins to passersby for charities benefiting girls and women in the third world (mostly), and which raised $1,500 in its first eleven weeks. Last year she was a runner-up to be Brooklyn's Poet Laureate, and that's a good thing because it sounds like it would have been the hardest of all her non-paying jobs to date. For more information, including profiles of all the presenters, click here.