Penn State English Department Creative Writing Program
(Mary E. Rolling Readers +Dickinson Lecturer + Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence)
(All readings take place in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library, at 7:30 pm)
Fall 2016
Ron Rash: Monday, September 26 (Rolling)
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to five other novels, including One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight, and Above the Waterfall; five collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, and most recently, Something Rich and Strange. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
Juan Felipe Herrera: Wednesday, October 19 (Dickinson Lecturer)
Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2017) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera has published many collections of poetry, and is a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novel in verse, Crashboomlove, received the Americas Award. He has written books of prose for children, one of which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.
Ruth Ellen Kocher: Thursday, November 3 (Rolling)
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Third Voice, (Tupelo Press, 2017), Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014), Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), and domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award. She lives in Erie, CO, and teaches Poetry, Poetics, and Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her BA in English from Penn State.
Caitlin Horrocks: Thursday, December 1 (Rolling)
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collection This Is Not Your City. Her work appears in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is fiction editor of The Kenyon Review and teaches at Grand Valley State University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her debut novel and second story collection are forthcoming from Little, Brown.
Spring 2017
James Brasfield: Thursday, January 19 (Rolling)
James Brasfield is the author of two poetry collections, Ledger of Crossroads and Infinite Altars, both available from LSU Press, and is translator of The Selected Poems of Oleh Lysheha. Twice a Senior Fulbright Fellow, he has received fellowships in poetry from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, among other honors. He teaches at Penn State.
Rachel Cantor: Thursday, February 16 (Rolling)
Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Good on Paper (Melville House 2016) and A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, One Story, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She has worked in five continents but now makes her home in Brooklyn, where she is completing her next novel.
Sarah Manguso: Thursday, March 23 (Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence)
Sarah Manguso is the author of four books of prose including Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship and suicide; and The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease. She is also the author of the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, poems from which have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, she grew up near Boston and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.