Students in this semester’s ENGL 209/Literary Journal Practicum are preparing to roll out the newest edition of KLIO, an online creative arts journal, sister to our long-running print journal, KALLIOPE.
Read all about what the staff has in store in this introductory letter from the editor-in-chief, Julia Mertes: “Welcome Back: Developing KLIO 2022 with New Sci-Fi/Fantasy Components.” And spread the word about the submission period, open now through April 3!
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.
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Penn State poet, professor, and Penn State Laureate Shara McCallum will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, February 3. Originally scheduled as in-person, this event will no longer be offered in-person. Instead, you can join Shara for a reading and discussion of her most recent book, No Ruined Stone, by joining the Zoom event (set up as an interactive meeting rather than webinar). Registration is required in advance, and you can register here.
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK, including “No Ruined Stone” (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. “La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room,” an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz.
Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for her previous book, “Madwoman”), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for her first book, “The Water Between Us”).
“No Ruined Stone” imagines what might have happened if poet Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland in 1786, as planned, to take a job on a slave plantation in Jamaica. According to poet Adrian Matejka, “the book mythologizes the poet Robert Burns and his imagined Jamaican descendants through a chorus of intergenerational voices. This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer’s most insidious tools and McCallum’s gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism.”
McCallum has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. During her tenure as Laureate, McCallum is delivering readings & events throughout the Commonwealth, US, & internationally, in person and virtually, and is hosting the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU.
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.
Congratulations goes to alum of the BA/MA program, Trae (David) Hawkins, currently in the MFA program at the University of Nevada. Trae recently won a prestigious award in support of his writing from the non-profit company We Need Diverse Books, in partnership with Penguin Random House. Trae’s manuscript was one of two selected to receive editorial critique and the possibility of a book contract—and he won money to boot.
The program is called the Black Creatives Revision Workshop, and Trae describes the experience and process of the workshop this way: “We basically got to have revision-focused workshops with the faculty listed on the website as well as virtual lunches with agents and editors who gave us insight into the industry. At the conclusion of the workshop, we got to submit our revised manuscripts to editors at PRH, and they chose two winners! The prize is essentially $4,500 along with the opportunity of having my manuscript floated to several imprints within PRH and strongly considered for publication by editors within these imprints. I also get editorial notes from the editor that chose my manuscript to win the prize. The timeline on when my manuscript is circulated to the PRH imprints is still being worked out, but I’m sure it’ll be sometime in the new year.”
Trae’s young adult manuscript, The Stars Are Ours, was reviewed by Matt Phipps, Assistant Editor at Penguin Young Readers. “I love the queer representation and it’s easy to rally behind this liberation narrative,” said Phipps.
More information about the project and winners can be found here: “WNDB and Penguin Random House Announce the Winners of the First Black Creatives Fund Revisions Workshop”. Congratulations, Trae!
Penn State English Department’s Undergraduate Writing Contests: Submit your fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to the department’s contests by Monday, January 24, 2022, for the chance to win awards and prize money. You can submit and find more details on the English department’s website.
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See your work in print! If you’re a Penn State University Park undergraduate during the 2021-22 academic year, Kalliope staff invite you to submit–fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. For details, see the Kalliope submissions page: https://kalliope.psu.edu/submissions/
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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.
Novelist and screenwriter Alissa Nutting will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. Free and open to the public, the reading will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 14, as a VIRTUAL event on Zoom.
Alissa Nutting is the author of the novels “Tampa” and “Made for Love” (a New York Times editor’s choice selection), as well as the story collection “Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls,” which won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications such as Tin House, BOMB, Elle, Real Simple, BuzzFeed, and many others. She is an assistant professor of English and writer-in-residence at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Nutting has been called “one of the most daring writers in America,” and her writing described as“blisteringly smart, feverishly inventive, darkly comic and surreal.” Booklist characterized her 2017 novel “Made for Love” as “a sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.” An HBOMax television series based on “Made for Love,” co-written and produced by Nutting, premiered in April 2021 and is considered a current “must watch” according to many critics. Nutting’s newest project–an Adult Swim cartoon entitled “Teenage Euthanasia,” about a partially undead family that owns a Florida funeral home–was recently featured on Time Magazine’s list of five best new TV shows for September 2021.
Advance registration for this virtual event is required and can be accessed via Zoom (registration link).
The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives generous 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. A full list of readings in the 2021-22 series, as well as links for livestreams and virtual readings, can be found at https://creativewriting.psu.edu/2021-22-reading-series/.
National Jewish Book Award winner, William Carlos Williams Award winner, and twice National Book Award Finalist, poet and critic Alicia Ostriker will offer a reading as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer. Free and open to the public, the reading will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, September 23, as a VIRTUAL event on Zoom.
Called “America’s most fiercely honest poet” by The Progressive, Ostriker is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry, which often explore such topics as family relationships, sexuality, politics, and religion (specifically Jewish identity). Her most recent collection is “The Volcano and After” (2020). Two of Ostriker’s earlier collections, “Waiting for the Light” (2017) and “The Book of Seventy” (2009), received the National Jewish Book Award. Twice a National Book Award Finalist, for “The Little Space” (1998) and “The Crack in Everything” (1996), and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award for “The Imaginary Lover” (1986), Ostriker is also known for her intelligent and passionate appraisal of women’s place in literature.
Ostriker’s critical work includes the now-classic “Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America,” and other books on American poetry from Walt Whitman to the present. She is also the author of critical books on the Bible, including the controversial “The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions.”
Her most recent poetry collection, published in 2020, “The Volcano and After” meshes together new and old poems from 2002-2019 that follow the challenges a person faces as they age. Joan Larkin describes “The Volcano and After” this way: “In a voice absolutely her own—wild, earthy, irreverent, full of humor and surprise—Ostriker takes on nothing less than what it feels like to be alive.”
In an interview with Vanderbilt, Ostriker calls writing a “spiritual experience” and goes on to say that the writer can “experience himself/herself as a vessel the wind of the spirit blows through,” and says further that to have this experience, you have to want it.
Ostriker lives in New York City. She taught at Rutgers University until 2004 and is currently Professor Emerita of English in the creative writing department there. She has also taught in two different MFA programs. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and many other outstanding journals.
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 is provided by the Penn State Department of English and the College of the Liberal Arts.
Advance registration for this virtual event is required and can be accessed via Zoom:
https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3B7-QTKWQbmoKPRgNs4LCg
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