Event

The Kelly Writers House invites you to the upcoming poetry program with Franny Choi.

FRANNY CHOI: READING AND CONVERSATION, Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program. Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, Excelano Project, Creative Writing Program, and the English Department.

Thursday, February 3, 6:00 PM (ET) on Zoom
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk | Arts Café

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We invite you to join us Thursday, February 3, at 6:00 PM (ET) on Zoom, for our annual Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program reading, featuring award-winning poet and performer, FRANNY CHOI. Choi's much-lauded latest book Soft Science is praised by Publisher's Weekly as “An exhilarating matrix of poetry, science, and technology.” Excelano Project President Ollie Dupuy (C'23) will host and lead a conversation with Choi following her reading. Register here to attend on Zoom.

FRANNY CHOI is a queer, Korean-American writer of poems, essays, and more. Her most recent book is Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), a Rumpus and Paris Review staff pick that Lit Hub praised as "a profoundly intelligent work that makes you feel." It was a Nylon Best Book of 2019, was awarded the Elgin Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2020, and was a finalist for awards from Lambda Literary, Publishing Triangle, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Choi is also the author of the chapbook, Death By Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and the debut collection, Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2019.) She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has also received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University's Lewis Center. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the poetry podcast VS with Danez Smith.

Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program
In honor of their daughter Caroline, whose longstanding presence and participation in Penn's spoken-word community helped inspire a resurgence of oral poetry on campus, Steven and Nancy Rothstein (CW'75) established a fund to support an annual oral poetry program at the Writers House. Each year we host a program or project featuring oral poetry in one of its many forms: spoken-word, slam, or sound poetry, to name only a few possibilities.