November 2026
Sunday, 11/1/2026
Monday, 11/2/2026
A Meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee
5:30 PM in the Arts Café
Join us for a meeting of the Writers House Planning Committee (also known as "the Hub") — the core group of engaged students, staff, faculty, and volunteers who help make things happen at Writers House. Anyone is welcome to become a Hub member by participating in Hub activities and helping out. Members of the Hub plan programs, share ideas, and discuss upcoming projects.
Tuesday, 11/3/2026
Wednesday, 11/4/2026
A conversation with Peter Canellos
12:00 PM in the Arts Café
hosted by: Dick Polman
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Peter S. Canellos was POLITICO’s executive editor, leading the newsroom during the 2016 presidential coverage; and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. He has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing along with the 2022 George Polk Award, Robin Toner Award, and News Leaders Association Batten Medal for his writing about the Supreme Court. He's the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero; the bestselling Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. His new book is Revenge for the Sixties, charting the rise of Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito.
ModPo Webcast, Week 10
3:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Everyone is welcome to join the people of ModPo for this live, interactive webcast — in person or online. ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.” Find more information about ModPo webcasts here.
A reading by Mark Nowak
But Company Reading Series
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
hosted by: Michelle Taransky
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Mark Nowak's books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and, most recently, . . . AGAIN, all from Coffee House Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Creative Capital foundations. Nowak recently wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press). He is founding director of the Worker Writers School.
About . . . AGAIN: Told through five abecedarian prose sections, . . . AGAIN is a photo-text commentary on MAGAism in America. In his sobering voice, Nowak captures the depredations of capitalism, the desensitizing regularity of mass shootings, and the extremism that has fueled white nationalism. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection through Donald Trump’s re-election, Nowak chronicles the transformations as the seasons change around him, attempting to make sense of a bitterly divided nation that elected a polarizing figurehead . . . again.
Thursday, 11/5/2026
Friday, 11/6/2026
Saturday, 11/7/2026
Sunday, 11/8/2026
Monday, 11/9/2026
ModPo Webcast, Final Words
12:00 PM in the Arts Café and on YouTube
Everyone is welcome to join the people of ModPo for this live, interactive webcast — in person or online. ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.” Find more information about ModPo webcasts here.
Tuesday, 11/10/2026
Seeing Shoah: A Conversation
Wexler Family Program in Jewish Life and Culture
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
hosted by: Al Filreis
rsvp: register here to attend in person
For four decades, students in a single University of Pennsylvania course gathered for an extraordinary experience: watching, in one sitting, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, the landmark 9½-hour documentary that challenges viewers to confront the Holocaust not as a closed chapter of history, but as a continuing presence. Join us for a conversation exploring the lasting impact of Shoah and what it means to carry the experience of seeing the film through time. Moderated by Al Filreis, this panel brings together Sophia DuRose, Emily Harnett, Carlos Decena, and Henry Steinberg for a discussion about memory, testimony, education, and the enduring questions raised by Lanzmann's monumental work. Drawing on the perspectives of those who have lived with the experience of watching Shoah, the conversation will consider how the film extends the vital act of noticing in personal, cultural, and transformative ways.
Wednesday, 11/11/2026
SPEAKEASY OPEN MIC NIGHT
Poetry, prose, and anything goes
7:00 PM in person
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Our student-run open mic night welcomes all kinds of readings and performances, so bring your poetry, your guitar, your or your flash fiction to share! You’ll have three minutes at the podium to perform (there will be a sign-up sheet available when you arrive). You’re also welcome to participate in the event as a member of the audience — no performance required. Come celebrate your classmates, colleagues, and fellow writers!
Thursday, 11/12/2026
Sam Sax: A Reading and Conversation
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
hosted by: Abbey Mei Otis and the students of the Kelly Writers House First Year Seminar
sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program
Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. Their most recent book is the debut novel Yr Dead (McSweeney’s, 2024), longlisted for a National Book Award in Fiction, winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award for Literary Fiction, and a Top Debut from Kirkus. Their most recent book of poems is Pig (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award. They’re the author of Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. A two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, they have poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta, and elsewhere. Sam has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, and MacDowell, and is currently serving as a Lecturer in an Interdisciplinary Arts program at Stanford University.
Friday, 11/13/2026
Saturday, 11/14/2026
Homecoming Open House
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM throughout the first floor
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Renew your acquaintance with the Kelly Writers House or get to know this lively and innovative home for writers of all ages and genres. Visit our Open House to join members of the KWH community for informal conversation, coffee, and light refreshments. Advanced registration is not required, but we'd love to hear from you!
Democratic Pedagogy
A conversation about learner-centered teaching
4:00 PM in the Arts Café
rsvp: register here to attend in person
hosted by: Al Filreis
What does it really mean to be a teacher and believe in — and practice — a student-centered pedagogy? Can teaching really be learner-centered rather than teacher-centered? Really?! How does democratic teaching actually work? It’s not just about the content that is taught and learned in a course — even if that content is about democracy. It’s also got to be about the form of the learning: collaborative, open, open-ended, digressive, random (or accidental), multi-vocal, enabling disagreement, and willing to resist set or even somewhat firm conclusions.
Al Filreis has aimed to teach in this mode, more or less, for his 40 years as a member of Penn’s faculty. This event brings back to campus six of Al’s former students for a wide-open discussion of wide-open discussion. Join us and discuss the discussion!
Participating are: Dan Bergmann, Deborah Greenberg, Emily Harnett, Amber Rose Johnson, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, and Lila Shermeta.
Sunday, 11/15/2026
Monday, 11/16/2026
Tuesday, 11/17/2026
A conversation with Mallary Tenore Tarpley
Author of SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery
12:00 PM in the Arts Café
hosted by: Jamie-Lee Jossleyn
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of
Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and the award-winning author of SLIP: Life in the
Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. SLIP is the 2026 recipient of the Association of American Publishers’
PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences. It also won first place in
the PROSE awards’ Clinical Medicine category and was a finalist in the Outstanding Work by a Trade Publisher category. While writing SLIP, Mallary received a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, which supported her research and reporting.
A journalist by trade, Mallary’s recent articles have appeared in The New York Times,
The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine,
and Harvard University’s Nieman Storyboard, among other publications.
She also publishes a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge,
featuring writing tips and best practices.
Mallary lives outside of Austin with her husband and two children.
The Poetic Record
Chris Mustazza in conversation with Charles Bernstein
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
rsvp: register here to attend in person
In the period immediately following the invention of sound recording, who first had the idea to record, collect, and study the voices of poets? PennSound Co-Director Chris Mustazza explores this question in The Poetic Record, a book that tells the story of voice collectors and poets working together to preserve this important dimension of sonic, musical, and literary history. Join us for a celebration and discussion of The Poetic Record, featuring Mustazza in conversation with Charles Bernstein.
Chris Mustazza is Co-Director of the PennSound archive, the world’s largest archive of recordings of poets, and he teaches in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of literary audio, sonic media archaeology, and digital analyses of poetry recordings.
Wednesday, 11/18/2026
The Re-Declaration Project: The Historical Imagination and an Iconic Document
A presentation by Johanna Drucker
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
rsvp: register here to attend in person
The American Philosophical Society invited book artist, scholar, and cultural critic
artist Johanna Drucker to engage with their exhibition, These Truths: The Declarations
of Independence, an exploration of how Americans used and reproduced the Declaration of
Independence during the first fifty years of its history. Join us at Writers House for a
presentation about Drucker’s resulting new work: The Re-Declaration Project, a
limited-edition print that incorporates typefaces and visual cues used in past
Declarations, while interrupting the text with new edits, hand drawings, and literary
experiment. In her contemporary Declaration, Drucker calls attention to the promises of
equality, freedom, and justice, which remain unfulfilled for many, including women, the
dispossessed, and a dying planet.
Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Information Studies, UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Her recent publications include The General Theory of Social Relativity (Elephants, 2028), Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021), and Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), documents the intellectual history of knowledge about the invention and spread of the alphabet. In addition to her scholarly work, Drucker is known for her creative artist’s book publications which are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014 and Graphic Animism, a retrospective of her artwork, was on exhibit in Los Angeles in 2025. Affluvia: The toxic off gassing of affluent culture,, was published by The Bridge in 2025 and she recently curated a group of “typo-translations” of a John Keats poem for Asymptote that included works by Adeena Karasik, Charles Bernstein, Danny Snelson and others.
Thursday, 11/19/2026
Sacred Houses
Lorene Cary and Duncan Faherty in conversation with Simone White
6:00 PM in the Arts Café
rsvp: register here to attend in person
Lorene Cary is a writer, memoirist, playwright, librettist, educator, director, and engaged citizen. Her memoirs include Black Ice, a best-selling book about attending St. Paul’s School in the 1970s, and Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century, which explores caretaking her grandmother. Her novels include The Price of a Child, the inaugural One Book One Philadelphia read; Pride, a girlfriend novel with serious bass notes; and If Sons, then Heirs, about family love and inheritance, through SC heir property laws and lynching. She has written multiple works for the stage, including My General Tubman, a fantastical, time-bending play exploring Harriet Tubman's life; Ladysitting as an opera and a play; and Drag, an operatic monologue that gives voice to Gladys Bentley, the great Black, rags-to-riches Drag King of the Harlem Renaissance. From 2010 until removed by Executive Order this past summer, Cary’s scripts for videos at The President's House exhibit on Independence Mall in Philadelphia showed the lives of nine African-Americans enslaved in President Washington's household, next to where the Liberty Bell is now displayed.
Cary teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and directs #VoteThatJawn to bring youth to the polls in Philly. She has received honorary doctorates from Swarthmore, Muhlenberg, Colby, and Keene State Colleges, and Arcadia and Gwynedd Mercy Universities. She has received numerous awards, including the Philadelphia Award, the Penn Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Shirley Chisolm Award in the Humanities, and the Leeway Award, among others.
Duncan Faherty is Professor of English & American Studies at Queens College & The Graduate Center, CUNY and the author most recently of The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers (2024). He is currently working on a book which explores contemporary artistic reconfigurations of early American histories.