PHILADELPHIA -- Robert Coover, Joan Didion and Mary Gordon will be the Kelly Writers House Fellows at the University of Pennsylvania for spring 2009.

Coover will visit Penn Feb. 23-24, Didion March 30-31 and Gordon April 27-28. Each Fellow’s visit will begin with a 6:30 p.m. Monday reading at Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, followed by a 10 a.m. Tuesday brunch and an interview-conversation the next morning which will be webcast live.

Students in the Writers House Fellows Seminar, taught by Writers House Faculty Director Al Filreis and funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, will study the work of all three fellows.

“The program enables us to realize two unusual goals,” Filreis said. “We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction -- more honored in practice than in theory -- between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.”

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 www.writing.upenn.edu/~whfellow/.

Reservations, which are required to attend each program and participate in webcasts, can be made at whfellow@writing.upenn.edu. All events are free and open to the public. Additional information is available by contacting Jamie-Lee Josselyn at 215 573-9749 or whfellow@writing.upenn.edu.