Event

Our annual "Writing about TV” program features personal essays, critical analysis, and smart talk about TV. For this year's event, six people will present about six different television shows, using the concept of “work” as a shared theme to guide their discussion. What can we learn about labor from its representations on television? Why does the workplace feature so prominently in our pop culture imaginary? What's interesting about work? Join us to find out!

DANI BLUM is a senior English major from Connecticut. She is the Managing Editor of 34th Street magazine.

ARI LEWIS is a senior who is double majoring in Cinema Studies and Communication from Los Angeles. She is a staff member of the Kelly Writers House, and also involved with CityStep and the Vagina Monologues on campus.

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. She is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Guernica, Electric Literature, AGNI, NPR, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year's Best Weird Fiction, and Best Women's Erotica. Her memoir House in Indiana is forthcoming in 2019 from Graywolf Press. Machado is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

DAVID MARCHINO is a creative nonfiction writer and super lightweight, whose work has appeared in The Penn Review and RKVRY Quarterly. His essay “No Goodbyes” won the 2016 Penn PubCo Award for Best First-Person Narrative, and his short manuscript He Will Be Remembered earned him honors from the University of Pennsylvania's Creative Writing Program. This past summer he served as Program Assistant for the Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop for Young Writers. Standing at five feet, eleven inches and weighing in at 141 pounds, he hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

JO PARK is Professor of English and Asian American Studies here at Penn. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics, Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature, and co-editor of Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity. Her greatest television-related regret is not ordering “The Infinite Dress” after viewing the infomercial. 

PAUL SAINT-AMOUR is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at Penn and teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature in the English Department. He's written two books: The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination; and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. He's thinking these days about climate, conflict, form, and time.