Rufus Wainwright at the Writers House

Had the pleasure of hanging out with Rufus Wainwright yesterday afternoon and evening at the Writers House. Anthony DeCurtis, above left, conducted a beautiful interview/conversation with him for an hour in front of a small audience of 50.

Anthony DeCurtis interviews Keith Richards

Our own Anthony DeCurtis recently interviewed Keith Richards at the New York Public Library. Here is one of the two courses Anthony will be teaching at CPCW/Writers House in the spring semester.

Times music critic

Nate Chinen, now a music critic for the New York Times, was a Writers House regular as a student and for the year or two afterward. Nate visited us again this past spring and here's a video of Anthony DeCurtis introducing him.

Anthony, Nate, Greg

From left to right: Anthony DeCurtis, Nate Chinen, and Greg Djanikian. Nate, my (and Greg's) former student and later a Kelly Writers House staffer, is now a regular music critic for the New York Times. See his NYT pieces.

Anthony DeCurtis

Listen to Anthony DeCurtis read from his writing. He teaches three courses each year through the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) and the Kelly Writers House at Penn. He's a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has written for nearly thirty years, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. He is the author of In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work (Hal Leonard, 2005) and Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters (Duke University Press, 1998). In addition, he coedited the third editions of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and The Rolling Stone Album Guide (both published by Random House, 1992), and edited Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (Duke, 1992). Most recently he edited Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer (Scribner, 2009). His awards include a 1988 Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category for his essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set "Crossroads," and three ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in writing about music. Anthony holds a Ph.D. in American literature from Indiana University and lives in New York City.

At the Kelly Writers House Anthony has hosted our annual Blutt Singer-songwriter Symposium: Roseanne Cash, Suzanne Vega, Steve Earle - and next, Rufus Wainwright. And he is co-director of the RealArts@PENN project. His course the "The Arts and Popular Culture" has become a must-take seminar for young Penn writers interested in criticism, reviews, profiles, interviews and other forms of cultural journalism.

read the words

Anthony DeCurtis had a piece in the New York Times yesterday, called "Peace, Love and Charlie Manson"--Anthony's contemplation of 1969, partly written in response to Arlo Guthrie's recent assertion that other than Woodstock there wasn't really anything else to remember from that year. Because I've been on the road a lot, and knew I wouldn't be able to take time to read the piece on paper or on screen, I decided to use Read the Words to make a quick audio version of it - read by a one of the Read the Words avatars, "Tom." Tom misses his share of pronunciation but I'm at least going to hear the piece twice tomorrow when I'm on the road again. You can hear Tom read Anthony's piece here.