All posts by Alison Jaenicke

CANCELED: U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to Deliver Emily Dickinson Lecture 9/29

This event has been canceled due to unexpected developments.
Plans for rescheduling are still in the works.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Pulitzer Prize-winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will offer a reading at Penn State as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer. The reading will be held in the Freeman Auditorium in the HUB-Robeson Center on Thursday, September 29 at 6:00 pm. This reading is free and open to the public.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). In his citation, Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote, “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.” Trethewey was the first Southerner to receive the honor since Robert Penn Warren, in 1986, and the first African-American since Rita Dove, in 1993.

Trethewey is the author of five collections of poetry: Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010.

Among her many honors, Trethewey is the recipient of the 2020 Bobbitt Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a 2017 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category, as well as the 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. In the citation, fellow poet and judge Marilyn Nelson stated: “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities. Whether writing of her complex family torn by tragic loss, or in diverse imagined voices from the more distant past, Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn, and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.”

Trethewey has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

In her second term as United States Poet Laureate, Trethewey’s signature project was a PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, “Where Poetry Lives.” In this series Trethewey traveled with Senior Correspondent Jeffrey Brown to cities across the United States in order to explore societal issues such as Alzheimer’s, domestic abuse, the civil rights movement, and incarcerated teenagers—all through the prism of poetry, literature, and Trethewey’s own personal experiences.

In addition to being United States Poet Laureate, she held the position of State Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2012-2016.

The Emily Dickinson Lectureship in American Poetry is made possible through the generosity of Penn State Alumni George and Barbara Kelly. Additional support for the event comes from the Penn State Department of English.

Professor Charlotte Holmes to Retire After 35 Years at Penn State

Professor of English & Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Charlotte Holmes joined the faculty at Penn State in 1987. Throughout her 35 years here, she served as thesis director for over 40 MFA writing students and acted as second reader for over 25 additional MFA students. She directed scores of undergraduate honors theses and graduate BA/MA theses. A significant number of these students have gone on to publish their writing and/or teach creative writing themselves.

Holmes directed the Creative Writing Program at Penn State from 2013-2020 and served as MFA Program Director from 1994-1997, as well as Acting Director in 2003. She has won many awards for her teaching, service, and writing. From Penn State, she received the George Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Stephanie J. Pavoucek Shields Faculty Award for the Mentoring of Women, the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Advising Award, and the College of Liberal Arts Award for Outstanding Teaching by Tenure-Line Faculty.

Charlotte Holmes’s collection of short fiction, The Grass Labyrinth, published in March 2016 by BkMk Press, received both the Gold Medal for the Short Story from the Independent Publishers Association (the IPPY) and the Gold Medal for the Short Story from Foreward magazine. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, Epoch, Grand Street, Narrative, New Letters, The New Yorker, and other magazines, and her poems in American Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, The Women’s Review of Books, and other journals. Her work has been cited for excellence in the O.Henry Prize Stories anthology, Best American Stories, and Best American Essays, and anthologized in After O’Connor: Contemporary Georgia Writers and in two volumes of New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best. The recipient of a Writer’s Exchange fellowship from Poets & Writers, she has also received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, two Pennsylvania Arts Council Fellowships, the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, a travel fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Professor Holmes’ contributions and impact during her long tenure at Penn State have been monumental.

We wish her a well-earned retirement with her husband, the poet and former Penn State professor James Brasfield, on the coast of Maine.

English Course Gives Students Deeper Awareness of Local History and Place

Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Liberal Arts Professor of English, designed and taught a course during the spring 2022 semester, entitled “Reading and Writing Place in Central Pennsylvania.”

Funded by the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence in Penn State Undergraduate Education, the course has students read literature set in or describing life in Centre County; they then engaged with their coursework through field trips. Texts in a variety of genres spanned from the 19th century all the way to the 2006 graphic memoir “Fun Home, set in the author’s childhood home in nearby Beech Creek, which the class visited.

Read more about the experience on Penn State News. 


Funding from the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence allowed students in the course ENGL 411 to visit sites in Centre County, including Eagle Iron Works and Curtin Village, Bellefonte and Aaronsburg (pictured), among others. Photo credit: Julia Spicher Kasdorf. All Rights Reserved.

 

Kalliope 2022 & KLIO 2022 Released!

Kalliope & KLIO 2022 hosted a joint release party and reading on Sunday, May 1, at Abba Java Coffeehouse, to celebrate the publication of their print and online literary and creative arts journals.

You can pick up your copy of Kalliope 2022 in any of the following locations: HUB-Robeson Center, Webster’s Bookstore (downtown), Burrowes Building (ground floor), Willard Building (main entrance, floor 1), and Sparks Building (main entrance, floor 1).

You can read KLIO Volume 6, entitled Altered Reality, online. 

 

Congratulations to BA/MA Class of 2022!

Last Friday, April 22, the eight graduating BA/MA students celebrated the culmination of their master’s theses by reading from their creative projects to an audience of family, friends, faculty, as well as continuing and newly admitted BA/MA students. The event was our first in-person student reading since 2019. Congratulations and best wishes to the graduating BA/MA students and welcome to the new students in the class of 2024!

 

L to R: Rachel Hynds, Georgia MacZura, Jaden Parker, Nate Ousey, Anushka Shah, Ryan Crossman, Hannah Singletary, Leigh Montes.

 

 

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series to present poet Tim Seibles April 7

Poet Tim Seibles will offer a reading at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 7, the final event in this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. 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 Philadelphia in 1955, Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including his most recent, “Voodoo Libretto” (Etruscan Press, 2022), “One Turn Around the Sun” (Etruscan Press, 2017), and “Fast Animal” (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award.

Fast Animal” is about the importance of remembering, the burden of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness. The National Book Award judges had this to say about the book: “Tim Seibles’ work is proof: the new American poet can’t just speak one language. In his new book, he fuses our street corners’ quickest wit, our violent vernaculars, and our numerous tongues of longing and love. He records danger. He records the sensual world. And he records a troubled enlightenment, which is a ‘fast animal’ pivoting toward two histories at once.”

Reflecting on writing, Seibles says, “I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach.”

Seibles’ poems have been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including “Best American Poetry.” Seibles has received fellowships from both the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and The National Endowment for the Arts.

Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016-18 and a former faculty member of Old Dominion University’s English Department and MFA in Creative Writing Program, Tim lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he continues to teach for the Muse Community Writing Center. He has also led workshops for Cave Canem, The Writers Hotel, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

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.

Fiction Writer Samuel Kọ́láwọlé to Join Creative Writing Faculty

We are delighted to announce that fiction writer Samuel Kọ́láwọlé will join the creative writing faculty as an assistant professor in the English Department at Penn State this fall!

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel The Road to Salt Sea is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Consequence, and is forthcoming from Harvard Review.

His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute.

Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the MFA in Writing faculty. He is working towards his Ph.D. at Georgia State University.

Here’s a sampling of Kọ́láwọlé’s writing, a story entitled “Sweet sweet strawberry taste,” published in AGNI (April 2019).

Welcome, Samuel!

Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence Paisley Rekdal to Read March 17

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA — Award-winning essayist and poet Paisley Rekdal will visit Penn State as the Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence during the week of March 14-18. As part of her visit, Rekdal will give a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 17, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. The in-person event also will be available via livestream; those interested in attending virtually must register in advance. 

Paisley Rekdalis the author of a book of essays, “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee”; the hybrid-genre photo-text memoir“Intimate”; the book-length essay “The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam”;and a book on cultural appropriation in literature titled “Appropriate: A Provocation”, published by W.W. Norton in February 2021.  She is also the author of six books of poetry: “A Crash of Rhinos,” “Six Girls Without Pants,” “The Invention of the Kaleidoscope,” “Animal Eye,” “Imaginary Vessels” and “Nightingale.”  

A two-time finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize, her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship and inclusion in five editions of the Best American Poetry series. She guest edited “The Best American Poetry 2020” anthology. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio, among others. A Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, Rekdal is currently serving as Utah’s poet laureate.  

In her most recent prose book, “Appropriate: A Provocation” (2021), Rekdal answers the question: “When is it appropriate to culturally appropriate in creative writing?” The Los Angeles Times describes the book and Rekdal’s treatment of this current, contentious issue this way: “framed as a series of letters to a white student, X, who has written a poem partly in the voice of an older Black person…. The letters investigate whether it is possible to successfully write across race, cases of racial impostors and interlopers, the nature of whiteness and much more…. As a woman of mixed white and Chinese descent, Rekdal has been both outsider and insider, has experienced both othering and privilege.” 

In her most recent collection of poems, Nightingale” (2019), Rekdal re-writes and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses.” The book won the Washington State Book Award and was named aWashington Post“Best Poetry Collection” selection and an NPR “Best of 2019” selection. The New York Journal of Books writes that the collection “explores what few writers since Ovid have reminded us: metamorphosis is a violent act, requiring dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation before we can become something new.” 

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence is also sponsored by the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of Liberal Arts. The reading is free and open to the public.  

(NOTE: In accordance with Penn State policy, all individuals are required to wear face masks inside all campus buildings, regardless of their vaccination status.)