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January 2009

Thursday, 1/1

Friday, 1/2

Saturday, 1/3

Sunday, 1/4

Monday, 1/5

Tuesday, 1/6

Wednesday, 1/7

Thursday, 1/8

Friday, 1/9

Saturday, 1/10

Sunday, 1/11

Monday, 1/12

Tuesday, 1/13

Wednesday, 1/14

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 1/15

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 1/16

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 1/17

Sunday, 1/18

Monday, 1/19

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 1/20

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Theorizing presents Amy Hollywood:

Amy Hollywood has been teaching at the Harvard Divinity School since 2005 after teaching at Rhodes College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Chicago. She is a historian of Christian thought specializing in mysticism, with strong interests in feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her first book, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995) received the International Congress of Medieval Studies' Otto Grundler Prize for the best book in medieval studies. Her second book, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002), deals with Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray and their fascination with excessive bodily and affective forms of Christian mysticism. Professor Hollywood is currently co-editing, with Patricia Beckman, the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism and completing a book of essays to be called "Acute Melancholia." She is also the editor of the Gender, Theory, and Religions Series for Columbia University Press.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 1/21

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose, and Anything Goes!


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 1/22

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: a reading of "The Travel Plays," short works by ArtsEdge Resident Greg Romero.

Greg Romero is a playwright/theater artist, originally from Louisiana. Currently based in Philadelphia, his works include The Most Beautiful Lullaby You've Ever Heard, The Milky Way Cabaret, The Mishumaa, and Dandelion Momma, and have been produced off-off Broadway by City Attic Theatre and Working Man's Clothes Productions, and across the country by Salvage Vanguard Theater, Rude Mechanicals Theatre Collective, Theater In My Basement, Specific Gravity Ensemble, and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Romero's work explores memory, imagination, pain, dreams, rites of passage, the overlapping of time, and the flawed and fascinating guts and souls of human beings. Inspired and haunted by space, Romero has created work performed in elevators, porches, warehouses, loft apartments, punk stages, museums, basement crawl spaces, and public bathrooms. Romero has also collaborated several times with electronic music composer Mike Vernusky on live performance projects including The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting, The Eulogy Project, and currently, Radio Ghosts in a form they are calling "electro-theater." Romero has been commissioned by The Cardboard Box Collaborative, Austin Script Works, and Audacity Theatre Lab, and is a member of Philadelphia Dramatists Center, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, and The Dramatists Guild of America. He has been a finalist for the Heideman Award, a semi-finalist for the Princess Grace Award and his works have been published by Heinemann Press and Playscripts, Inc. Romero received a BA in Liberal Arts from the Louisiana Scholars College and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas-Austin where he held the James A. Michener Fellowship. He has taught Playwriting at The Eugene O'Neill National Theater Institute, The Wilma Theater, and Philadelphia Dramatists Center and taught Theater at The University of the Arts and Saint Joseph's University. Most recently, Romero was selected as the first-ever Resident Writer of the ArtsEdge Residency, created by The Kelly Writers House and The University of Pennsylvania.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 1/23

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 1/24

Sunday, 1/25

Monday, 1/26

7:00PM in the Arts Cafe: LIVE at the Writers House featuring Writing ALoud with InterAct Theatre Company.

The award-winning series, Writing Aloud, celebrates its tenth season in 2008/2009. Known for presenting diverse voices in contemporary fiction, Writing Aloud features short fictional stories by the region's best writers, read on stage by professional actors. Local newspapers have noted:

"... an engrossing mix of storytelling and theater."

- Philadelphia City Paper

"... [brings] contemporary short fiction by some of the region's best writers to life."

- Philadelphia Daily News

"...has found a way to please both the lovers of fiction and the wistful nonreaders for whom stories lost all magic when they were no longer read aloud."

- The Philadelphia Inquirer

This special LIVE will feature three stories by Liz Abrams-Morley, Jonathan Liebson, and Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha performed by members of InterAct Theatre.

Liz Abrams-Morley is the author of the full-length poetry collection Learning to Calculate the Half Life, (Zinka Press, 2001) and two chapbooks including What Winter Reveals, (Plan B Press, 2005.) Her second full-length collection, Necessary Turns, is due out from Word Press in 2010. Liz's poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of nationally distributed journals and anthologies and both have been read on National Public Radio. She is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty at Rosemont College, has worked as a poet-in-residence in grades K-12 in public and private schools throughout Pennsylvania, and is one of three director/editors at and a co-founder of an online writing consultation business, www.writearoundtheblock.org). In the rest of her life she lives with her husband and two dog-like cats in Philadelphia, is a mother, a mother-in-law, wife, sister, family caretaker, friend and lapsed family therapist. She wades knee-deep in the flow of everyday life from which she draws constant inspiration and occasional exasperation.

Jonathan Liebson's work has appeared in Chelsea, South Dakota Review, Harvard Review, Meridian and The Georgia Review, among other places, and has also won awards or been honored by The Atlantic Monthly and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom's annual fiction competition. A graduate of Wesleyan University, he holds an M.A. in literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, and an MFA in fiction from NYU. He currently teaches writing and literature at Eugene Lang College of The New School, in New York.

Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha's work has appeared in Carve, Fiction Attic, Literary Mama, and Pindeldyboz. She earned a Masters in Fiction from Temple University, where she currently teaches creative writing. She also teaches reading and writing at Camden County College in New Jersey. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and is currently working on her first novel.

LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration between the Kelly Writers House and WXPN FM (88.5). Six times annually between September and April, Michaela Majoun hosts a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest, all from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. LIVE is made possible by generous support from BigRoc. For more information, contact Producer Erin Gautsche (gautsche@writing.upenn.edu ).


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Tuesday, 1/27

5:30 PM in the Arts Cafe: "Rebuilding The Temple: Typesetting George Herbert Several Centuries Out of Context"


Print inevitably creates several degrees of separation between manuscript and finished form, author and audience. Taking George Herbert's posthumously published collection of poems, The Temple, into account, this panel will discuss the paper trail of Herbert's manuscripts through to their 17th century incarnations, as well as the process of adapting them to print form today. The problems that arise along the way ultimately cast the typesetter as both a source of survival for the poems through print and, paradoxically, the chief cause of textual variants and deformations of the author's work.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Wednesday, 1/28

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: A Bridge from Brooklyn to Boston?: Kafka Imagining America.


How did Franz Kafka, who never traveled outside Europe, come to write a novel set in the United States? Is the Prague-born Kafka, who had American relatives and read critical accounts of this country by European travelers, fashioning a topsy-turvy version of the American dream? To what extent is his vision of America a dark fantasy along the lines of his famous story "The Metamorphosis"?

Mark Harman, translator of Kafka's novel The Castle (Schocken Books/Random House) — which won the Modern Language Association's first Lois Roth Award — recently completed for the same publisher a new translation of Kafka's engaging first novel, Amerika: The Missing Person (pub. date November 18, 2008). The session at Kelly Writers House will include a reading of a short extract and a panel discussion addressing such questions as well as the challenges involved in translating modern classics.

Harman, who has taught a popular course on Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett at Penn, is currently Chair of Modern Languages and Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College.


Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Thursday, 1/29

5:00 PM in the Arts Cafe: Mind of Winter - A Writers House Planning Committee ("Hub") Gathering.

Each January the Writers House hub beats the midwinter doldrums with a community celebration of wintry writing and warming food. We light a fire in the fireplace and spend the day making soups and stews. For more information about the "hub" or to RSVP, write to wh@writing.upenn.edu.

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Friday, 1/30

Meetings and classes (may require registration or permission; email for more info)

Saturday, 1/31