Penn State associate professor of fiction and nonfiction Elizabeth Kadetsky will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. Free and open to the public, the reading will be held in Foster Auditorium in Paterno Library on Thursday, November 4, at 7:00 pm, as well as livestreamed.   

A two-time Fulbright scholar to India and a 30-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, Elizabeth Kadetsky published her first book, the memoir “First There is a Mountain” (2004), after researching and studying with the yogi BKS Iyengar in Pune, India. Kadetsky’s most recent book, “The Memory Eaters,” a lyric memoir from University of Massachusetts Press (April 2020), was the winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She has also published the novella “On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World” (Nouvella, 2015) and the short story collection “The Poison That Purifies You” (C&R Press, 2014).  Her short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a nonfiction editor at New England Review.  

A memoir-in-essays, “The Memory Eaters” illuminates Kadetsky’s battles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, her sister’s addiction, and her family’s secrets. It was named among “great books from small presses to read now” by Buzzfeed when it was released near the start of the COVID pandemic in April 2020, and was featured in the Boston Globe, The Rumpus, She Reads, and elsewhere. The book’s epigraph offers a verse from “The Odyssey,” wherein Homer’s Lotus Eaters lapse into forgetfulness after eating the addictive fruit, a state the book’s title echoes. ” ‘The Memory Eaters’ functions as love letters to single mothers, to New York City of the ’70s and ’80s, to the fashion industry, to graffiti artists, and to Kadetsky’s own mother, of course,” notes reviewer Jeff Parker. Author Paisley Rekdal commends the way “Kadetsky’s nuanced essays explore the complicated contradictions inherent to memory, how memory holds us captive to our familial wounds, while at the same time helping us preserve the stories, and presences, of those we love.” 

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives 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 University Libraries. 

Registration for the livestream is required and can be accessed via Zoom.