Event

Help us honor the humor, pathos, and enduring wisdom of children’s books through a celebration of The Sensible Nonsense Project, curated by Arielle Brousse (C'07, SPP'12) and supported by the Lucy F DeMarco Fund for Youth Literature. Six community members will share stories about their favorite books from childhood, what those books taught them, and how those lessons continue to influence their adult lives. This year’s readers include Huda Fakhrredine, Josh Herren (C’13), Mahailya Hinsey (C’23), Sarah Marshall, Anton Moore, and Chelsey Zhu (C’22).
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Huda Fakhreddine
Huda Fakhreddine’s work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free verse poem and the prose poem. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning(BOA editions, 2017) and The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Middle Eastern Literatures among others. Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. Her book The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2021.

Josh Herren
Josh Herren is a writer and elementary school teacher living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Josh has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked at the Kelly Writers House and wrote about history, sexuality, and art. He currently writes about theater for Phindie and the Broad Street Review. He also hosts the Chosen by Committee podcast, in which he and his cohosts are reading every pulitzer prize winning play since 1918 so you don't have to. Josh is passionate about education, theater, and convincing others that Philadelphia is the greatest city on earth. Oh, and he is married to KWH alum, Henry Steinberg.

Mahailya Hinsey
Mahailya Hinsey is a sophomore in the college studying creative writing and photography. She works for the Kelly Writers House. She's always loved books and has been making up stories for as long as she can remember including long nonsense "survival" scenarios. Nowadays she can be found avoiding people and watching clips from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Sarah Marshall
Sarah Marshall is a writer, podcaster, and media critic focused on setting straight our collective memory—or at least getting to the bottom of why we believe and in turn define ourselves by popular narrative and myth. Why is the maligned woman a staple of our news media? Why do we believe that serial killers are brilliant? How do we keep stumbling into all these moral panics? These are some of the questions that propel Sarah forward. She is the co-host of the popular modern history podcast You’re Wrong About, which has been highlighted in the New Yorker, the Guardian and Time Magazine. Her writing has appeared in the Believer, Buzzfeed and the true crime collection Unspeakable Acts. She loves Portland, Oregon, Philly and Las Vegas in that order, and it has been rumored that she is writing a book about the Satanic Panic.

Anton Moore
Anton Moore works as a freelance TV producer, a community activist and an event planner. He is President and Founder of Unity in the Community, a non-profit dedicated to bringing about change to the lives of South Philadelphians. Anton’s been called a ‘Game changer’ (CBS News), a ‘Hero of the Community’, and “one of the city’s promising young leaders” in BillyPenn’s list for “Who’s Next: Public Service”. In 2016 he was appointed by Governor Tom Wolf to be a member of the Pennsylvania Commission on African American Affairs which serves as the commonwealth’s advocate agency for the African American community in Pennsylvania. For seven years he produced & booked talent for television segments for Black Entertainment Television’s (BET) Rap City , for BET Award show specials, and the BET Hip Hop show “The Deal”. He started in broadcasting as an intern at WUSL radio (Power 99 FM) and went on to be a show producer, Promotions Assistant, and onsite personality while also attending the Community College of Philadelphia. Anton was born in Philadelphia and was raised in the Tasker Homes Housing Development in South Philadelphia.

Chelsey Zhu
Chelsey is a junior in the College studying English and Classics. She is the Campus Editor for 34th Street Magazine. She also co-hosts, edits, and produces a podcast on children's literature called Kidlit Chronicles, which discusses the value in adults revisiting childhood classics and the effect that nostalgia has on our impressions of books. The podcast is available on Spotify.