Chinelo Okparanta

545c58c6cff7d.imageImage by Kevin Kelley for The Daily Collegian

Our most recent visitor as part of the Mary E. Rollings Reading Series was Penn State alumna Chinelo Okparanta. She completed her undergraduate degree at Penn State and even took English 212, an introductory fiction workshop, with our own Charlotte Holmes. She went on to receive an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and publish a book of short stories titled Happiness, Like Water, which was an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review and was listed in The Guardians’ Best African Fiction of 2013.

In addition to the reading, students were fortunate enough to have a Q&A with Chinelo, during which she discussed the process by which she writes and how she found herself with a book contract and then with a wildly successful book, her struggles with titles, and how her real world experiences shaped, inspired, and influenced the stories that became her first published collection. It was such a treat to get to meet someone who has graduated from our university and found such success, and she absolutely deserves every bit of it. She is an incredibly talented writer and a smart and fantastic person to talk with, and we are all so happy that she came back to visit her alma mater.

Article written by Sarah Marie Moesta

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