Award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky will offer a reading as the twenty-fourth annual Emily Dickinson Lecture in American Poetry. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 21 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

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During a visit to Penn State through the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series on September 19, award-winning fiction writer Jai Chakrabarti came to Professor Kọ́láwọlé’s graduate fiction-writing class to talk about specifics on craft, process, and his writing.

He also held a public reading, where he read the short story “The Fortunes of Others” from his collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness and answered questions from the audience. Find out more about the reading in an article from The Daily Collegian by Emily Lin.

Our next event will be a reading by the writer Sherrie Flick on October 10 at 6:00pm in the Foster Auditorium of the Paterno Library.

Nationally renowned fiction writer Sherrie Flick 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, October 10, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Sherrie Flick is the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College and a senior lecturer at Chatham University. Recent awards include a 2023 Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Her debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist is part of the American Lives series at University of Nebraska Press. One of the essays in Homing, “All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,” originally published in New England Review, was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. Flick is the author of Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories, Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel. She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 (with guest editor Aimee Bender), and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She writes, works, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Please see the poster below for more information about the event:

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Nationally renowned fiction writer Jai Chakrabarti 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, September 19, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ’21), which was awareded the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. The novel was also recognized as the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, a finalist for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Chakrabarti is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf), which was among The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. His short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space.

Chakrabarti’s nonfiction has been widely published in journals such as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Chakrabarti is also a trained computer scientist.

Born in Kolkata, India, he currently lives in New York with his family and is a faculty member at Bennington Writing Seminars.