Department of English

• Monday, February 11, 2019 - 6:30pm to 8:00pm
• Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

Reading: Monday, February 11 at 6:30PM

Interview/conversation with brunch: Tuesday, February 12 at 10:00 AM

John R. Keene, born in St. Louis in 1965, is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, translator, and professor best known for his fictions, Annotations (1995, New Directions) and Counternarratives (2015, New Directions). The latter book received an American Book Award. Keene received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College, and an MFA from New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and has been a Graduate Fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. He is the author of the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer. Keene received a 2005 Whiting Writers Award for fiction and poetry. He has had his work published in a wide array of journals, including African-American Review, AGNI, Encyclopedia, Gay and Lesbian Review, Hambone, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Mandorla, Ploughshares, and Public Space. He teaches at Rutgers-Newark where he is an Associate Professor of English, chair of the Department of African American and African studies. He also teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing. John Keene is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Seating is strictly limited for these programs, and an RSVP is required to attend. Please note the following program dates and times, and you can RSVP for any (or all!) of the programs in the 2019 Kelly Writers House Fellows series by writing to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu indicating  the programs you want to attend.

For more information about this year's Fellows and the program series in general, please visit the Kelly Writers House Fellows webpage  http://www.writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/