At one point in my early 20s, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania was a literal second home. During my senior year, when I had a job as its first assistant coordinator, I probably spent more cumulative hours there than at my actual apartment: shuttling brilliant novelists and poets to and from 30th Street Station; listening to said writers both in formal and informal settings; playing a Thursday-night gig with my resident jazz combo, a quintet. (Somewhere there's tape.) This photo at right is me at 21, reading an occasional poem for the Kelly Writers House grand reopening in 1997. 

So there was never any doubt that the KWH would be the Philadelphia stop on my book tour. I'm looking forward to seeing some familiar faces there (and some new faces, too). I’m so pleased that the event will be taking place in the same tented garden space where the Writers House recently celebrated its 20th anniversary — and that I’ll be joined in conversation by the eminent critic Anthony DeCurtis, author of Lou Reed: A Life. Come hang!