Temple University Poets & Writers Series
Public readings by Recognized and Emerging Authors

The Poets & Writers Series is sponsored by the Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, with the assistance of the Richard Moyer Fund. Each year a number of poets and fiction writers are invited to speak (usually on Thursdays) to members of both the Temple community and the local Philadelphia arts scene. Joining each invited writer is a writer from Temple's graduate program in Creative Writing. For a list of all writers who have visited Temple's Creative Writing program, click here.

All events are free and open to the public.

Spring 2009 Poets & Writers Series

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
Anselm Berrigan
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Anselm Berrigan is the author of three books of poetry, all published by Edge Books: Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Integrity & Dramatic Life. His book Free Cell will be published by City Lights in 2009. Berrigan is Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts, and also teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. From 2003-2007 he was the Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, published in 2005 by University of California Press. He's the current Poetry Editor of The Brooklyn Rail (brooklynrail.org) and lives in the East Village of Manhattan, where he grew up.

Thursday, February 26, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Kenneth Goldsmith's is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. A book of his critical essays, Uncreative Writing, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Thursday, March 26, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
MAGGIE NELSON
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Maggie Nelson is the author of The Red Parts, a nonfiction book about her family, media spectacle, sexual violence, and criminal justice, and a critical study about poetry and painting, Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions (winner of the 2008 Susanne M. Glasscock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). She is also the author of several books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes; Jane: A Murder, The Latest Winter, and Shiner. In 2007 she received an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. Currently she’s working on a book of creative nonfiction about the color blue titled Bluets, due out from Wave Books in Fall 2009. She is on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles. 

Week of April 6
Cole Swenson, Spring 2009 Writer-in-Residence
lecture: Wednesday, April 8, 2009 - 3:00-4:30 Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall, Main Campus
reading: Thursday, April 9, 2008 - 8:00 p.m. Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Cole Swensen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry; the most recent is Ours (University of California Press). Others include Goest, Such Rich Hour, Oh, Try (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Noon (winner of the New American Poetry Series Award), Numen, Park, New Math (winner of the National Poetry Series), and It's Alive, She Says. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A highly regarded translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism, her translation of Jean Fremon’s The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation. She is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets. She is on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Washington D.C., Iowa City, and Paris. 

Thursday, April 23, 2008 - 8:00 p.m.
James Morrow 
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
James Morrow has been writing fiction since, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, he dictated “The Story of the Dog Family,” a three-page, six-chapter fantasy. Morrow has published nine novels and two short story collections.  He has won two World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, and the Grand Prix de Imaginaire.  The New York Times praised his postmodern historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, for fusing “storytelling, showmanship and provocative book-club bait ... into one inventive feat.”  Morrow followed this novel with a sequel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which NPR called “an ingenious riff on Frankenstein.”  His novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, is set in 1945 and dramatizes the U.S. Navy’s attempts to leverage a Japanese surrender via a biological weapon strongly reminiscent of Godzilla.

Fall 2008 Poets & Writers Series

Thursday, September 18, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
EVA MEKLER’s first novel Sunrise Shows Late, was called “austerely beautiful” by Publishers Weekly. The Christian Science Monitor said it was “…told with a deep sense of compassion and a keen eye for character.” It takes place in Landsberg DP camp. Her most recent novel, The Polish Woman, was called “…a meticulous, raw study of the uneasy relationship between Catholic and Jewish Poles…” by The New York Times, “a stunner” by Kirkus Review and “…emotionally tantalizing…” by Publishers Weekly. Besides writing fiction, she is the author of six books on the theater and psychology and, under a pseudonym, a book on Yiddish slang. She is also an actress and has appeared in the Yiddish Theater. She is a school psychologist for the New York City Department of Education.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 | 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall, Main Campus (lecture)
and
Thursday, October 16, 2008 | 8:00 p.m. (reading)
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN is the author of four books — three works of fiction (The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband) and one work of non-fiction, The Art of Political Murder. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Ordinary Seaman, his second novel, was a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. The Art of Political Murder was a New York Times 100 Notable Book of 2007 and a Washington Post Book World 100 Best Books of 2007. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His fiction and journalism have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City and Mexico City.

Thursday, October 30, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
PETER GIZZI’s books include The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from the Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Thursday, November 20, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
Born in Tobago, M. NOURBESE PHILIP is a poet, novelist, and essayist who lives in Toronto, Canada. Her books of poetry include Thorns, Salmon Courage, She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks (winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literature), and Zong! (just published by Wesleyan University Press). Her novels include Harriet’s Daughter and Looking for Lingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. Her books of essays include Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel, and Geneology of Resistance and Other Essays. Her honors include grants from the Canada Council and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Toronto Arts Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at Bellagio, Italy.

Thursday, December 4, 2008 | 8:00 p.m.
Temple University Center City, 1515 Market Street, Room 222
JOSEPH MCELROY was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He was educated at Williams College and Columbia University. He is the author of nine novels: A Smuggler’s Bible (1966) Hind’s Kidnap (1969), Ancient History: A Paraphase (1971), Lookout Cartridge (1974), Plus (1977), Women and Men (1987), The Letter Left to Me (1989), Actress in the House (2003), and Cannonball (forthcoming, 2007). A volume of his essays, Exponential (2003), has been published in Italy. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Among other universities he has taught at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, the University of Paris, and the City University of New York.

Spring 2008 Poets & Writers Series

January 30
3:00-5:00, Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall, Main Campus
TRACIE MORRIS is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer, with installations at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. The recipient of numerous awards for poetry and performance, she holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Currently she is Visiting Professor of English at Temple University and the CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

February 21
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
MENDI & KEITH OBADIKE make music, art, and literature. The Washington Post calls their work “daring, funny and innovative.”  A series of Mendi and Keith’s media works are featured in the anthologies Re: skin and in the forthcoming Sound Unbound (both from M.I.T. Press).  In a 2001 performance work they offered Keith’s blackness for sale on eBay with a list of benefits and warnings. In 2004 Mendi’s book of poetry Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press) received the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and Keith received a Connecticut of Critic’s Circle Award for Outstanding Sound Design for work at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Recently they completed Big House/Disclosure, a 200 hour house song/sound installation about slavery for Northwestern University for which they received a Pick-Laudati Award. Keith is an assistant professor in the College Arts and Communication at William Paterson University.  Mendi is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

March 6
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
JENNIFER EGAN is a novelist, journalist and short story writer. Her most recent novel, The Keep, was a National Bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book for 2006. Other of her books are Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, The Invisible Circus, which became a movie starring Cameron Diaz, and Emerald City and Other Stories. She has written for the New York Times Magazine on topics such as homeless children, Catholic seminarians, and single mothers using donor sperm. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope and Ploughshares, among others. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was recently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Born in Chicago, she lives currently in Brooklyn.

March 20
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
Born in Toronto, for many years Canadian writer LISA ROBERTSON lived in Vancouver, where she was a member of The Kootenay School ofWriting, and Artspeak Gallery. Her books of poetry include XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, The Weather, and Rousseau's Boat. In Spring 2006, Bookthug, in Toronto, published a new book of poems, The Men. She writes essays and collaborative texts for the visual arts, and these have been collected in the book Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. She has taught or held residencies at many universities, including Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. After 4 years living in France, where she began translating the poetry of Eric Suchere and Michele Bernstein's Situationist novel Tous les chevaux du roi, she is now visiting artist at California College of the Arts.

April 10
8:00, Room 222, Temple Center City Campus, 1515 Market
MICHAEL SWANWICK has received a Hugo Award for short fiction an unprecedented five times in six years.  He has also received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial and World Fantasy Awards. His stories regularly appear in Best of the Year anthologies and have been translated and published throughout the world.  His newest novel, The Dragons of Babel, appeared in January from Tor Books. The Dog Said Bow-Wow, his most recent collection, is available from Tachyon Publications. With his wife, Marianne Porter, he lives in Philadelphia

For more information, call 215.204.1796.