PHILADELPHIA – Three acclaimed writers have been tapped to serve as Spring 2011 Fellows at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House.

Novelist and non-fiction writer Susan Cheever will visit Penn’s campus Feb. 14-15, playwright Edward Albee March 21-22 and poetry critic Marjorie Perloff April 25-26 for evening readings and informal teaching sessions with young writers and aspiring writers and writer-critics.

Cheever has published five novels and seven works of nonfiction ranging from her memoir of her father, “Home Before Dark,” to her most recent book, “Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction.”  Her forthcoming book “Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography” is slated for publication in November.  Cheever has taught at Yale, Hunter College and the New School, and she is on the faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, has been hailed by the New Yorker as "the greatest living playwright."  He is perhaps best known for his dramatic play “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  It won both the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle awards.  Albee's other plays include “The Zoo Story,” “A Delicate Balance,” “Seascape,” “Three Tall Women” and the Tony-winning “The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia.”  He is a Kennedy Center Honoree, was awarded the National Medal of Arts and received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre.

Perloff is one America’s foremost critics of modern and contemporary poetry.

She is author of hundreds of essays and many books, including “Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media,” “The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage” and most recently “Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century.”  She is professor emerita of English at Stanford University and is currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California.

Each Fellow’s visit will begin with an evening reading at Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, followed the next day by a brunch and a public interview-conversation the following morning.  All programs will be streamed live and recorded for Writers House digital archives.

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/.

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