PHILADELPHIA – The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania has announced that John Ashbery, Janet Malcolm and Rodrigo García
have been selected Spring 2013 Fellows.    

Ashbery will visit Penn’s campus Feb. 11-12, Malcom March 18-19 and García
April 22-23 for evening readings and informal teaching sessions with young writers, aspiring writers and writer-critics.

Critics have called Ashbery the greatest living American poet. He is the author of more than 25 books of poetry and is a celebrated French poetry translator.  His most recent poetry collections, A Worldly Country and Planisphere, were published in 2007 and 2009 respectively.  His early work in particular is associated with the "New York School" of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. Ashbery is the recipient of numerous awards. In 1984 he won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for A Wave.  For the 1975 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror he received three of the most prestigious awards for poetry: the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Some Trees (1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Malcolm, who will visit Penn in March, has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1963 when she began her writing career at the magazine with  "About the House," a column on interiors and design.  She then went on to write a photography column and contribute book reviews and pieces to the magazine. She is the author of eight books, among them, In the Freud Archives (1984) which tells of three scholars' relationship to Freud and the study of him; The Silent Woman (1995) which investigates the relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; Reading Chekhov (2001) which combines close readings of Chekhov with biographical pieces about his life and Malcolm's own travels; and Two Lives: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in War and Peace (2007) which interprets the relationship between these two important modernist women, their work and the society in which they lived.

The third Fellow, Rodrigo García, whom the Washington Post referred to as "the man who loves women" in a 2010 profile, is a director and writer for TV and film, celebrated for his intimate, emotional and invested portrayals of his characters. He directed several independent movies, which attracted critical acclaim, such as “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her” (2000), “Nine Lives” (2005), and “Albert Nobbs” (2011).  He created, wrote, and directed the HBO series In Treatment, which ran from 2008 through the end of 2010.

On the first night of their visit, each Fellow will read from his or her work at Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, at 6:30 p.m. The following morning at 10 o’clock, each will attend a private Writers House brunch followed by a one-hour public interview/conversation. Attendance for both programs is by reservation only.  Reservations should be directed to Lily Applebaum, at whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.

Both public programs will be streamed live on the web at www.writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv.

The course description, syllabi from previous years, images and bios of this year’s Fellows and past Fellows, as well as links to archived readings and Webcasts, are available at http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/.