Department of English

• Monday, October 30, 2017 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Kelly Writers House

Co-Sponsored by Perry World House
Supported by the Provost's Interdisciplinary Arts Fund
RSVP: wh@writing.upenn.edu or 215-746-7636

Yevgenia Albats is editor-in-chief of the Russian political weekly The New Times. She is also an anchor with the Echo Moskva broadcasting and a recipient of several journalism awards worldwide. She received the Golden Pen Award in 1989, the highest journalism honor in the then-Soviet Union. She was an Alfred Friendly fellow in 1990 and a fellow of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 1993. Albats is the author of four books, including The State Within A State: KGB and Its Hold on Russia. Past, Present and Future. Albats has a PhD in political science from Harvard University. She has lectured at many universities in the US and Europe, including Yale University and Oxford University. She is a permanent professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Dick Polman is the Maury Povich "writer in residence," a full-time member of the CPCW faculty, as well as a political columnist and daily blogger forThe Philadelphia Inquirer. He spent 22 years on the Inquirer writing staff; most recently, as the national political writer from 1992 to 2006, he covered four presidential elections and dozens of Senate and House races nationwide. At other times, he was a foreign correspondent based in London; a baseball writer covering the Philadelphia Phillies; a general-assignment feature writer; and a longtime regular contributor to the newspaper's Sunday magazine, where he wrote long-form pieces about everything from Nazi war criminals to the comeback of the condom. Prior to the Inquirer, he was a metro columnist on the Hartford Courant, and was the founding editor of an alternative newspaper, the Hartford Advocate. Dick attended George Washington University, where he served as managing editor of the college newspaper, and graduated with a !
 BA in Public Affairs in 1973. He first came to Penn in 1999, when he audited classes during a one-semester fellowship, and he started teaching at Penn part time in 2003. Dick and his wife, Elise Vider, live in Center City. They have a son, who works at Comcast in Center City, and a daughter who is a web designer in San Francisco.