Department of English

• Monday, February 20, 2023 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
• Tuesday, February 21, 2023 - 10:00am to 11:30am

Kelly Writers House

From New York and Charleston, South Carolina, Joan Retallack is a celebrated poet, critic, biographer, and scholar. She is the author of 8 books of poetry, most recently Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont'd, an Artforum Best Book of 2010. Her other books include Memnoir (2004), How to Do Things With Words (1998), Afterrimages (1995), and Circumstantial Evidence (1985). Her honors are vast, including a Pushcart Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and grants from the Lannan Foundation for poetry and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her critical studies, including The Poethical Wager, emphasize imagination and alterity and are playfully philosophical. She was the director of Language and Thinking Program at Bard College for ten years, and then served as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, teaching courses related to her interests in experimental traditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, poetics, and the philosophy of language.

Monday, 2/20/2023—6:30 PM: a reading & talk
Tuesday, 2/21/2023—10 AM: brunch, then interview/conversation moderated by Simone White & Al Filreis To reserve seats, write to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu