Al Filreis

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor of English, faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, codirector of PennSound, and publisher of Jacket2 magazine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a faculty member and an administrator since 1985. Filreis produces and hosts PoemTalk, a monthly Poetry Foundation podcast.

Filreis has published many essays on modern and contemporary American poetry, the literary history of the 1930s and 1950s, the literary politics of the Cold War, the end of the lecture, and digital humanities pedagogy. His newest books are 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (Columbia University Press, 2021) and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, edited with Anna Strong Safford (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Among his previous books are Modernism from Right to Left (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton, 2016), and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 

Filreis has won many teaching awards at Penn. The Carnegie Foundation named him Pennsylvania Professor of the Year in 2000, and the Chronicle of Higher Education named him one of the Top Ten Tech Innovators in Higher Education for 2013.