UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Memoirist and fiction writer Grace Talusan will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 24. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium and will also be available via livestream. 

Born in the Philippines and raised in the US, Grace Talusan is the author of the memoir, “The Body Papers,” a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, the winner in nonfiction for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and the recipient of Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her short story, “The Book of Life and Death,” was chosen for the 2020 Boston Book Festival’s One City One Story program and was translated into several languages, including Tagalog. She has published essays in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and the New York Times. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Award in Prose. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She lives outside of Boston with her husband, photographer Alonso Nichols. 

Kirkus Reviews characterizes Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir “The Body Papers” this way: “A Filipino-American writer’s debut memoir about how she overcame a personal history fraught with racism, sexual trauma, mental illness, and cancer …. Moving and eloquent, Talusan’s book is a testament not only to one woman’s fierce will to live, but also to the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.” Novelist Celeste Ng notes that: “Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us,” calling the book “a stunning work by a powerful new writer who—like the best memoirists—transcends the personal to speak on a universal level.”  

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.