Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents Jamil Jan Kochai on April 10

Nationally renowned fiction writer, Jamil Jan Kochai, will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 10 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize.

His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New YorkerThe New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.

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Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents Adrienne Su on March 20

Distinguished poet, Adrienne Su, will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 20 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), which was named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her first book of prose, the essay collection Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (Paul Dry Books, 2024), focuses on poetry and food.

Su’s poems, which have been described by Paisley Rekdal as “sky, smart, and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving,” appear in many anthologies, including six volumes of The Best American Poetry, as well as journals including Prairie Schooner, The Common, and The New Yorker. Among her awards are an NEA fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Frost Place, and Vermont Studio Center.

An Atlanta native, Adrienne Su lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing at Dickinson College.

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Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence Kelly McMasters to Read February 27

Critically acclaimed author Kelly McMasters will visit Penn State February 24-27 as this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. She will give a free public reading as part of her visit on Thursday, February 27 at 6 p.m. in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The American Scholar, Literary Hub, Newsday, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Romper, and The Rumpus, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others.

She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in New York.

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence program brings a well-known writer to campus each year to share their expertise and work with students in undergraduate creative writing classes and the graduate BA/MA creative writing program. The visit is funded primarily through the generosity of Steven Fisher, a 1970 Penn State graduate in English, with additional support from the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

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Out Loud in Bellefonte is Back! Now at The Print Factory

The first Out Loud in Bellefonte at the Print Factory event will take place on Friday, February 7 at 6 p.m. with the launch of a memoir and new collection of poems by distinguished Penn State professor Keith Gilyard.

A two-time American Book Award winner, Gilyard will read from The Promise of Language: A Memoir as well as forthcoming On Location: Poems. His vivid coming-of-age story, set against the rhythms of Black America’s vernacular language and music, recalls the Cold War Era, and Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Power movements. Always tuned into words, Gilyard brings his experiences and realizations to life with memories of barbershops, churches, schools, and his own emergence as a poet, scholar, and professor.

Organized by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Penn State University, Out Loud in Bellefonte was named for a line attributed to Émile Zola: “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” The project was initially inspired by Colina Seeley Colina (1928-2017), a local woman who also lived out loud.

At a meeting of the Bellefonte Historical and Cultural Association (BHCA) during the bitter January of 2013, Colina demanded, “We must have poetry!” Colina was a child resister of German occupation in her home in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where her father, an anthropology professor at the University, was targeted by the Nazis. As a young woman, she migrated to the United States to study social work, and went on to become a politically engaged social worker, mother, and wife of a Penn State chemistry professor who was also an immigrant. On the death of her first husband in the 1990s, Colina moved to Bellefonte and joined the BHCA.

From 2013 until 2020, BHCA sponsored Out Loud in Bellefonte at the Bellefonte Art Museum for Centre County. The range of events included literary readings, storytelling, and children’s readings. After the pandemic, Out Loud sponsored one poetry festival and one full season of readings hosted by St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Out Loud at The Print Factory will resume as a literary series with readings scheduled for the first Fridays of February, April, and May, then September, October, and November.  Mark your calendars for 6 pm on May 2, when Print Factory volunteer Huzaifa Malik will host a PSU student poetry reading in the Out Loud series.

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series Presents Samuel Kọ́láwọlé

Critically acclaimed fiction writer and Penn State Creative Writing Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 30 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of a new novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, a finalist for the International Book Awards and currently longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. 

His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and other literary publications.

He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, and the UK’s The First Novel Prize. He won an Editor-Writer Mentorship Program Award for Diverse Writers. 

He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and holds a Master of Arts degree in creative writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is a graduate of the MFA in writing and publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and creative writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden, and the United States and was visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Creative Writing.

He currently teaches fiction writing as an assistant professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is also a faculty member in the low-residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. 

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Hometown Voices Reading Series: Spring 2025 Lineup

Each month, Tempest Studios (140 Kelly Alley in State College) hosts local writers in its Hometown Voices Performance & Reading Series.

Check out the lineup for Spring 2025:

  • POSTPONED: Sunday, January 19, 3pm: Abby Minor & Todd Davis
  • Sunday, February 16, 3pm: Erin Murphy & Jared Conti
  • Sunday, March 16, 3pm: Erica Quinn & Brad Baumgartner
  • Sunday, April 27, 3pm: Nicole Miyashiro & Mary Rohrer-Dann

Todd Davis has a new book, Ditch Memory. So does Erin Murphy: Fluent in Blue. Abby Minor’s most recent book, As I Said: A Dissent, came out in 2022, as did Brad Baumgartner’s most recent, Dead Man’s Switch. Mary Rohrer-Dann’s most recent book, Accidents of Being, came out in 2023.

Questions about the Hometown Voices series? Email Rachael Wiley at rwiley@psu.edu.

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Dickinson Lectureship in American Poetry presents Ilya Kaminsky on November 21

Author Photo of Ilya KaminskyAward-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky will offer a reading as the twenty-fourth annual Emily Dickinson Lecture in American Poetry. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 21 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

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Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents Jami Nakamura Lin on November 14

Author Photo of Jami Nakamura LinAccomplished writer and 2013 Penn State alum, Jami Nakamura Lin, will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 14 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the speculative memoir The Night Parade (illustrated by her sister Cori Nakamura Lin), published by Mariner Books/HarperCollins. The Night Parade was named a Best Book of 2023 by the Boston Globe and Vulture/New York Magazine, and was given starred reviews by Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews.

Her work interrogates mythology, monstrosity, madness, and motherhood, and is influenced by Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan folklore.

She is a former Catapult essay columnist, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts / Japan-US Friendship Commission, Folger Shakespeare Library, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, We Need Diverse Books, and the Illinois Arts Council, among others. She is a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation awardee and her work was shortlisted for the 2021 Chicago Review of Books Awards. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the Pennsylvania State University.

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Jai Chakrabarti Visits Penn State

During a visit to Penn State through the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series on September 19, award-winning fiction writer Jai Chakrabarti came to Professor Kọ́láwọlé’s graduate fiction-writing class to talk about specifics on craft, process, and his writing.

He also held a public reading, where he read the short story “The Fortunes of Others” from his collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness and answered questions from the audience. Find out more about the reading in an article from The Daily Collegian by Emily Lin.

Our next event will be a reading by the writer Sherrie Flick on October 10 at 6:00pm in the Foster Auditorium of the Paterno Library.

Harrisburg Book Festival October 9-13

 

The Harrisburg Book Festival will take place this fall from October 9-13. The 5-day event will feature over two dozen award-winning authors, an outdoor tent sale with over 30,000+ books, and children’s day programs. You don’t want to miss the largest free book festival in Pennsylvania!

This year, the festival will host such authors as James McBride, Edwidge Danticat, Chuck Wendig, David W. Blight, Olivia Blake, Eliza Griswold, Sarah Lewis, and more! We look forward to this local celebration of writers and books every year.

Date: Wednesday, October 9th to Sunday, October 13th, 2023
Location: Midtown Scholar Bookstore, 1302 N 3rd St Harrisburg, PA 17102
Website: www.hbgbookfest.com
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/share/DdinBQjxvLS8d6qW/