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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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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Award-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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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.

Nationally renowned fiction writer Sherrie Flick 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, October 10, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Sherrie Flick is the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College and a senior lecturer at Chatham University. Recent awards include a 2023 Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Her debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist is part of the American Lives series at University of Nebraska Press. One of the essays in Homing, “All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,” originally published in New England Review, was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. Flick is the author of Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories, Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel. She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 (with guest editor Aimee Bender), and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She writes, works, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Please see the poster below for more information about the event:

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