On Friday, April 19, 2024, the Penn State creative writing community gathered to listen to excerpts from the final projects by nine BA/MA students who will graduate with their MA in creative writing this spring.
Pictured below are the BA/MA Class of 2024 (L to R): back row–Nikolai Korbich, Ava Wendelken, Emmanuela Eneh, Aliyah Rios, Barbara Kutz, Margaret Dressler; front row–Kiera Sargent, Cynthia Rodi, Eliza Nicewonger.
Congrats to the graduates!
In addition to celebrating the graduating BA/MA class with family, faculty, and friends, we also welcomed the 10 incoming members of the BA/MA class of 2026, said farewell to Alison Jaenicke, who has served as Assistant Director of Creative Writing for the past 11 years, and welcomed the new Assistant Director of CW, Ellen Skirvin.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Essayist, poet, and Penn State grad Christine Hume 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 11, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.
Christine Hume’s most recent essay collection, “Everything I Never Wanted to Know”(Ohio State University Press, 2023), confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the United States.Kirkus Review calls it a “thoughtfully disturbing, sharp sociological study,” and Publishers Weekly describes it as a “dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” The New York Times calls her previous book “Saturation Project,” a lyric portrait of girlhood, “a richly, meditative lyric memoir…that arrives with the force of a hurricane.”
Hume was born to a military family and lived in more than 25 places in the U.S. and Europe before settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her recent essay collection geographically focuses on Ypsilanti, which has the third largest number of registered sexual offenders in the country and the fourth largest per capita. Since 2001 she has taught in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 1993 and a PhD from University of Denver in 2000. Soon after she published three books of poetry – “Musca Domestica,” “Alaskaphrenia,” and “Shot”–her writing evolved into prose forms, especially documentary, experimental, and lyric approaches to the essay.
Julia Kasdorf with WCoNA Founder and President PJ Piccirillo.
At its 2024 conference, held March 15-16 at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA, the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) honored professor and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf with its annual Outstanding Contribution Award.
The purpose of the award is “to recognize an individual, ensemble, team or organization whose contributions or body of literary work have furthered the WCoNA mission to honor the region’s distinct literature, or, by extension, its people, and/or whose contributions enhance or have enhanced the craft of our authors, inspiring new work that represents northern Appalachia, the region of the Appalachia counties of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and the northern portion of West Virginia.”
At the conference’s closing ceremony, WCoNA Founder and President PJ Piccirillo read the following tribute to Kasdorf, written by WCoNA Board of Directors memberKimberly McElhatten, who nominated her for the award.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf‘s body of work and literary citizenship go beyond honoring the northern Appalachia canon. They advocate for it–its land, its animals, its plants, its people, its cultures, its diversity, and its stories to be heard.
In her early career, she focused on preserving and elevating Amish and Mennonite voices in the northern Appalachian canon. Kasdorf wrote the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (Cascadia, 2002). Yoder was the first to transcribe Amish hymns, which had only been preserved orally until then. He additionally wrote Rosanna of the Amish, claimed to be a true story of his mother’s life, in an effort to counter the false and negative literary representations of Amish culture depicted in Amish romances from the early 1900s until the 1930s—a work that has remained in print since 1940 and has sold over 500,000 copies.
At Messiah College, Kasdorf started the campus’ first literary series open to the public and doubled its budget. She also served as the faculty advisor for the campus literary magazine. At Penn State, she introduced the “The Writer in the Community” course and trained MFA students to teach in non-academic settings, such as long-term care facilities, community youth centers, jails, teen shelters, and beyond. This program continues as the non-profit Ridgelines Language Arts, founded and co-directed by one of her former MFA advisees, Abby Minor.
In her 24 years as a professor at Penn State, Kasdorf has directed the English Department’s MFA program and now the Creative Writing Program and has contributed to numerous community-facing literary projects, including the Public Poetry Project (formerly sponsored by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book), Centre County Reads, and the Favorite Poem Project of State College. She’s served on the editorial review team at Penn State Press. She is currently the faculty advisor of the Creative Writing Club at PSU.
In collaboration with graduate student Josh Brown, she published a new edition of Fred Lewis Pattee’s novel, The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains, set in late 19th century northern Appalachia, an effort that helps preserve Pattee’s legacy as the founder of American literary study, but also the post-Civil War cultural, social, and emotional landscape unique to northern Appalachia.
Additionally, Kasdorf contributes to communities and organizations beyond State College and PSU, including the popular reading series “Out Loud in Bellefonte.” She’s also served as a Public Humanities Council Commonwealth Speaker. In collaboration with community and university artists, she conceived and wrote lyrics for the musical performance and filmed oral histories about the invention of the folding and portable Ferris wheel in Centre Hall, PA, first performed as “aMUSEment: Play in the Workshop” and later as “Bright Toys of Summer: Garbrick Amusements from the Workshop to the Fair.”
Most recently, she helped coordinate a local history project to research and make visible the significant 19th and 20th-century Black history in Centre County. On this project, she mentored the writing of and produced a staged reading and musical performance of a play based on that research, “Finding Home: Adeline Lawson Graham, Colored Citizen of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.”
She’s a regular instructor at Chatham University’s Summer Community of Writers and regularly teaches at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center.
Most importantly, her mentorship extends beyond the classroom and public eye, offering emerging writers valuable mentorship, guidance, and support on their journey to successful publishing and academic careers, many of whom are also doing good, important work across northern Appalachia at our universities and colleges, elevating and diversifying our literary representation. Through these efforts, Julia Spicher Kasdorf has become an integral part of our region’s literary community and canon.
In addition to her legacy as an influential literary citizen of northern Appalachia, Kasdorf is a documentary poet who records and preserves our diverse stories with a keen eye on the impact of industry, war, and politics on our people.
Most notably, her book Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, along with her work in progress that will document agricultural resilience within thirty miles of her home in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, captures her commitment to our narratives. Her meticulous documentation does more than tell our stories; it enhances the craft of authors across northern Appalachia, influencing and inspiring the future of our literary canon.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf has emerged as a distinguished voice in American poetry, especially renowned for her vivid portrayal of the Ridge and Valley region of northern Appalachia. Kasdorf’s influence extends beyond her poetry; she is a pillar in the educational and artistic communities of northern Appalachia.
Her work and influence reach into our universities, communities, and beyond with twenty-one features on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and publications in esteemed magazines like Prairie Schooner, the Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. This broad recognition is a testament to her skill in capturing the essence of our region in her poetry.
–WCoNA Board of Directors memberKimberly McElhatten
WCoNA’s Outstanding Contribution Award comes with a donation of $300 in the name of the award winner, given to an organization or institution serving to broaden literacy within some part of northern Appalachia. Julia has selected Ridgelines Language Arts as the recipient of this year’s award funds. Ridgelines is a Bellefonte-based organization founded and co-directed by Abby Minor, a former student of Julia’s in Penn State’s MFA program in creative writing.
Ridgelines “provides expert language arts instruction to those who are underserved in the rural ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. We teach language arts—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.”
Congratulations to Julia for this well-deserved recognition!
On March 22 and 23, Penn State Sustainability is offering several events featuring eco-poet, nonfiction nature writer, and professor Heather Swan. Swan will be joining Penn State for these events, open to all:
Keynote and Reading, Friday, March 22, at noon in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library (virtual attendance is possible — a registration link will be coming soon).
Nature Writing Workshop, Friday, March 22, at 4 p.m. in 201 Patterson Building, co-hosted with the Penn State Arboretum (space is limited) — register here
Heather Swan’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, Phoebe, Cold Mountain, The Raleigh Review, Basalt, About Place, Midwestern Gothic, The Hopper and anthologies such as Healing the Divide, New Poetry from the Midwest, and The Rewilding Anthology. Her chapbook, The Edge of Damage, was published by Parallel Press and won the Wisconsin Writers Chapbook Award, and her full collection, A Kinship with Ash, was published by Terrapin Books. Her nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Aeon, Catapult, The Learned Pig, Minding Nature, Edge Effects, Belt Magazine, and Resilience Journal and her book, Where Honeybees Thrive Stories from the Field, was published by Penn State Press. She teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
During a visit to Penn State the week of February 19, award-winning novelist Matthew Salesses interacted with students and faculty during a fiction-writing class visit, a panel discussion on the antiracist and student-centered classroom, and a public reading, where he read from his most recent novel The Sense of Wonder and answered questions.
Below are a few photos from the February 22 reading, where BA/MA student and creative writing intern Dana Lynch introduced the author.
(Lynch is pictured with Salesses in the first photo; BA/MA student Maria Pavlenko is pictured with Salesses in the second).
(photo credit for Salesses at podium: Marissa Cruz)
Penn State professor Julia Spicher Kasdorf and former colleague C.S. Giscombe will offer a poetry reading and discussion as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading is free and open to the public and will be held at 6 pm on Thursday, March 21 in Foster Auditorium in Paterno Library.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf teaches poetry and directs the creative writing program at Penn State. She is the author of five poetry collections, including “Sleeping Preacher,” “Eve’s Striptease,” “Poetry in America,” and “Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields,” a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer and Penn State professor Steven Rubin. Her newest book of poems, “As Is,” was published in 2023 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
C.S. Giscombe lived for a decade in State College and Bellefonte while he taught creative writing at Penn State. He currently teaches poetry at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. His prose and poetry books include “Prairie Style,” “Ohio Railroads” (a long poem in the form of an essay), “Border Towns,” and “Similarly” (selected poetry and new work). His newest book, “Negro Mountain,” was called one of the best poetry collections of 2023 by The New York Times.
Both Kasdorf’s and Giscombe’s most recent projects meditate on and explore the idea of place, specifically the mountains in the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania. Of Kasdorf’s book “As Is,” reviewer Sofia Samatar writes: “Her poems bear witness to rough, hardscrabble places, the labor of those who live there, and histories on the verge of dissolving in a rapidly changing environment.” Giscombe’s “Negro Mountain” is titled after the long ridge of the Allegheny Mountains straddling the Pennsylvania border with Maryland, the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania. According to The University of Chicago Press, the name “Negro Mountain” comes from “an ‘incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century; this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection.”
Author Matthew Salesseswill 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, February 22, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.
During his visit, Salesses will also participate in a panel discussion on “The Antiracist Classroom.”This event will be held on Wednesday February 21, 2024, 4:00 p.m, in the Grucci Room, 102 Burrowes Building, and is open to faculty across literature and writing disciplines.
Matthew Salesses is a novelist, scholar, and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely about adoption, race, and parenting. He is the award-winning author of eight books, most recently a novel, “The Sense of Wonder” (2023) and a fiction writing guidebook, “Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping” (2021). Forthcoming is a memoir, “To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.” In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. Salesses is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Salesses’ latest novel, “The Sense of Wonder,” was named on many “best of” lists, including The New Yorker’sBest Books of 2023.Ron Charles of The Washington Post characterizes the novel this way: “What Salesses does here is a remarkable feat of artistic prowess that somehow blends the themes of K-drama with the spectacle of sports drama in a way that resets our frame of reference for the Korean American experience. Indeed, it’s a move that doesn’t seem entirely possible until you see the jump yourself.”
“The Antiracist Classroom” panel discussion on February 21, sponsored by the English Department’s Antiracism and Equity Committee, along with the Global Asias Initiative, will focus on creating just and equitable classroom environments through syllabus and course design, whether in the creative writing workshop or the literature or rhetoric classroom. The discussion will draw on insights from Salesses’ recent book “Craft in the Real World,” which challenges those teaching creative writing to look at traditional writing workshop practices with a fresh eye and an antiracist lens. As Book Page noted in its review, “The world has changed, and the writing workshop must catch up.”
In addition to Matthew Salesses, the panel will feature William Germanoand Kit Nicholls (coauthors of “Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything”). William Germano is professor of English at Cooper Union. His books include “Getting It Published” and “From Dissertation to Book.” Kit Nicholls is director of the Center for Writing at Cooper Union, where he teaches writing, literature, and cultural studies. Panelists will be in conversation with each other and with attendees.
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.
Did you know that Joseph Heller began writing his famous satirical novel about war, Catch-22, while teaching English at Penn State in the 1950s? Did you know that the namesake for our campus’ Pattee Library, Fred Lewis Pattee, had his novel The House of the Black Ring rejected in various forms fourteen times before it was published in 1905?
For more about the history of these and other Penn State writers, stop by Burrowes Building’s fourth floor display case, which has a new design and new material, just in time to inspire Penn State students writers for the new semester. In addition to learning about Heller and Pattee, you’ll see information about and books by Theodore Roethke, Joseph L. Grucci, John Barth, Diane Ackerman, Agah Shahid Ali, and Robin Becker.
The project was created as collaboration between Director of Creative Writing Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Sophia Alexander, a design major with a creative writing minor. Sophia is in her last semester here at Penn State and she will use this project in her design portfolio as she searches for jobs this semester.
Professor Kasdorf notes: “My hope in putting this together is that students will see themselves as part of this long and rich tradition of people writing works of literature in this place.”
Poet and Penn State Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African Studies and Comparative Literature Gabeba Baderoon has shared the following call for poems about Gaza–
Several faculty members at Penn State have created a project to gather poems about Gaza in the words of Gazans. We ourselves are turning to poetry for comfort and a sense of justice and beauty in the face of devastating violence, and we plan to create a website with music and audio recordings of poems read by Palestinians. We think poetry and art are ways to fight the dehumanization, erasure and blatant justification of violence in many portrayals of Palestine, and to show the full and deep humanity of the people of that land.
Please share any poems (in written, audio or video form) by Palestinians via the link provided below by February 16.
There is also a growing genre of art (including poetry) being created in solidarity with Gaza. This is a secondary part of our project and if you encounter any examples of these, please also share them.
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Did you know that Joseph Heller began writing his famous satirical novel about war, Catch-22, while teaching English at Penn State in the 1950s? Did you know that the namesake for our campus’ Pattee Library, Fred Lewis Pattee, had his novel The House of the Black Ring rejected in various forms fourteen times before it was published in 1905?
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