Event

co-sponsored by: the Asian American Studies Program, Excelano Project, Creative Writing Program, and the English Department

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.

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.