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The 15th Room Press is an imprint project named to help us imagine an extra room beyond our 14-room cottage. In the two years since the project's inception, we have initiated two broadside series - one which features the work of our visiting poets and one, called the "Hub Series," which features the work of our community members. We have learned to design our projects, hand-set movable type, ink and clean the presses, and hand-print the final product. Every year we also collaborate with our partners at the Common Press for special press workshops and embark upon larger limited-editions projects.
For Penn alumni and Penn families: All you need is an email account, and a willingness to engage in free and perhaps free-wheeling discussion of an interesting book with a member of Penn's faculty.
This program pairs Penn students with volunteer alumni mentors who work as novelists, editors, publishers, literary agents, screenplay writers for film and television, poets, playwrights, feature writers, humanities teachers in public and private schools, journalists, administrators of arts organizations, university professors, freelance writers, spoken-word performers, arts activists, cartoonists, and in many other capacities.
Exhibitions of visual art take place at Writers House during the academic year, from September through May, are typically one month long, and include a reception at some point during the month. We are especially interested in the work of emerging artists. For more information, please contact Kaegan Sparks at kaegan@sas.upenn.edu.
The Brave Star Collective is a volunteer mentoring program that matches bright, creative teenage girls from University City High School and West Philadelphia High School with writers affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.
The Common Press is the letterpress printing studio at the University of Pennsylvania. The press is a collaboration of interests at Penn, including writing (Kelly Writers House), print culture (the Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and visual arts and design (the School of Design). The facility provides a mixed media environment where students can move between digital and manual image making, collaborating with writers, printmakers and others in the book arts. The Common Press exists to assist in teaching design and to facilitate collaborative projects across the university. It was founded on January 17, 2006, the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's birth.
The purpose of the Junior Fellow project is to encourage excellent Pennstudents to stay in the Philadelphia area as they develop their creative talents in the months immediately following graduation. A competition is held among graduating Penn seniors who apply for the Kelly Writers House Junior Fellowship. The recipient of this honor helps to create new programs at the House, and at the same time is given study space and resources to write and create new art.
Eric Karlan offers summaries and analyses of events and projects at the Kelly Writers House.
During April (National Poetry Month) in 1999, fourteen poets from the Kelly Writers House -- students, professors, alumni, and staff -- published occasional poems on the Commentary page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Each poem, which had to be fifteen lines or less, was inspired by an article that had appeared in The Inquirer a week before.
Supported annually by Penn alumni Brian (W'90) and Jerilyn Perman (C'91), our literacy outreach program "Write-On!" offers West Philadelphia grade school children fun, safe, and educational extracurricular writing activities. On Fridays and Saturdays throughout the semester, grade schoolers from the Lea Elementary and Penn Alexander schools visit the Writers House to participate in creative writing and public speaking exercises, coached by dedicated undergraduate volunteers. The children work in small groups - two Penn undergraduate coaches for every four or five kids - writing, laughing, reading, and eating snacks. To find out more, email Writers House Director Jessica Lowenthal (jalowent@writing.upenn.edu).
The Saturday Reading Cooperative was a literacy program run by Penn students, in collaboration with Lea Elementary School, at 47th and Locust Streets in West Philadelphia. The program was designed to expose kids to print material, as well as target communication and writing skills, and non-violence.