Al Filreis

In 2003, Filreis and poet Charles Bernstein started PennSound, a website that serves as an archive of recordings of poets reading their own work. PennSound allows viewers of the site to listen to high quality MP3s of both individual poems and complete modern and historic readings from poets such as John Ashbery, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. PennSound further aims to preserve recordings that could otherwise be at risk for deterioration if not converted from older recorded media.

In 1995, Filreis founded the Kelly Writers House, a non-profit, community organization dedicated to creative writing and the literary arts. The three-story cottage in the center of the University of Pennsylvania campus hosts a variety of programs and projects open to the public, including poetry readings, seminars, film screenings, lectures and art exhibits. Filreis also directs the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program, a program that brings different writers such as Edward Albee, Joan Didion and Art Spiegelman to the Writers House each year for interviews and readings that are broadcast live to a worldwide audience via webcast. Each year Filreis teaches a seminar in which students study the works of the visiting fellows.

In the late 1990s, Filreis became known as an experimenter in online learning. As a 2001 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine describes, students in Filreis’s classes prepare for discussions by using listservs and online social media to respond to videos, reading materials, and even cartoons compiled on websites Filreis creates for his classes. Filreis, who believes that real learning occurs through guided discussion and not through lectures, “uses technology to free class time for discussion.”

Al Filreis (born 1956) is the Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. With Charles Bernstein, he founded PennSound in 2003; PennSound is a large archive of recordings of poets reading their own poetry. Filreis is also publisher of Jacket2 magazine and host of a monthly podcast series called "PoemTalk", a collaboration with the Poetry Foundation. Among his books are Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to Left, and Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960.

Since the early days of the internet Filreis has also managed three thematic websites: on modern American poetry, on representations of the Holocaust, and on the cultural cold war of the 1950s. The sites provide links to reference material, academic criticism, and primary sources related to each site’s respective subject matter.