Kelly Writers House

'You bet your garden'

The great garden guy, Mike McGrath, the Philadelphia-based host of NPR's You Bet Your Garden, was a guest reader-performed on Live at the Writers House, our monthly radio program aired on XPN 88.5 FM.

Origins of Speakeasy

"Speakeasy" is the name given to the twice-monthly open-mic performance night at the Kelly Writers House. It's had a remarkable run for a decade. Courtney Zoffness, who now teaches creative writing at CPCW, was then an undergrad and was among Speakeasy's founders.

Writing actually as works of art

The Modern Language Association conference was held in Philadelphia last December (’06) and, as usual, the local newspaper feels obliged to cover it. Usually such stories devote most of the space to mockery at arcane, whacky paper topics and seem inevitably to have a jokey, anti-PC, antiacademic tone: how silly, all this.

Daughter is to dad as beach is to mountains

Each May, as the families of undergrad seniors come to Philly for their kids’ commencement, we hold a celebration to honor a group of students who have been closely — sometimes very closely — affiliated with the Writers House. This year’s “senior capstone event” honored twelve seniors.

My podcasts

I happily host two podcast series. One is PennSound podcasts, which features recordings from that vast archive of poetry recordings. The other series, Kelly Writers House podcasts, presents excerpts from various sorts of programs, events, seminars and discussions at the Writers House. Please listen and let me know what you think.

The very first news article about the Writers House (1995)


My former student Randi Feigenbaum was a big-wig at Penn’s student-run daily newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, at the time the Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk was just forming. It was in those weeks and months known as one of the “pilot” projects of the “Twenty-first-century Project for the Undergraduate Experience” at Penn. Randi’s news piece was published in the December 7, 1995, issue of the DP. It gives a pretty good sense of what we were trying to get started there. To this day, Randi is a big supporter of the Writers House.

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