New York Times bestselling novelist Justin Torres will give a reading on Thursday, September 20, as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The event will be held at 7:30 pm in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Torres’ first novel We the Animals (2011) has won numerous awards, has been translated into fifteen languages, and has been adapted into a feature film, released in August, directed by Jeremiah Zager (see trailer below). National Public Radio called it a “brilliantly compressed novel…taut, elegant, lean,” noting that it is “told in a series of scenes that burst open like exploding stars, full of violence and light… a kind of ode to the bond of brotherhood.”

Torres has also published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at The New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012’s 5 Under 35. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series events are free and open to the public. The series is a project of Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. It receives generous support from the College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of English, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing, and the University Libraries. Co-sponsorship for this reading is provided by the LGBTQA Student Resource Center and Latina/o Studies.