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Interview with Visiting Assistant Professor Ali Araghi

Ali Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator and the winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing. His writing and translation have appeared in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Asymptote, among other places. His debut novel, The Immortals of Tehran, was published in 2020 and has since been translated into Dutch and Arabic.

Creative Writing Program intern Ky McKenna sits down with writer, translator, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ali Araghi for a discussion on craft, teaching philosophies, and writing in translation. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Ky: I want to formally, and finally, welcome you to the English department and to Penn State! I’d like to take this time to get a brief introduction and talk to you a bit about your writing process, maybe certain elements of your teaching process as well.

Ali: I usually introduce myself as a writer first, an Iranian writer and translator. I started off as a translator in Iran. Then, I went to fiction workshops, and I wrote my own short stories. Even though I came to the US for my MFA in fiction, the first book I published was a collection of poems that I translated from Farsi into English. So, it’s funny, because in English too, I was first a published translator and then a published writer. I love translating, but I love writing my own fiction maybe a little bit more.

Since I wrote the first draft of my first novel, I fell in love with the form. I was a short story writer before. My stories were tiny, flash fiction length. When I put the last period and at the end of the first draft of my novel, I was so exhilarated that I said, I want to be a novelist. This’s my form. That is to say, in the past couple of years I’ve been just writing novels. Well, by novels [I mean] two. It feels like I wrote more because with the first one I realized the first draft needs some structural rewriting. I slashed half of it [and] butchered the other half. It felt like I wrote two novels. With the second one I’m working on, too, I’ve done so many rounds of revision that it feels like I wrote more than one. In short, I’ve been working on the two novels and translating on the side in the past couple of years. And now I teach, too. 

Ky:  You mentioned that you first came to writing through the translation of poetry, and I’d like to know if you feel that poetry, or maybe just your experience with it, has affected your writing process or the way you approach prose. I’m really interested in how the two practices overlap.

Ali: I actually started off as a poet. The joke is that everyone is a poet in Iran. I was one of those poets when I was 18 or 19. I wrote classical Persian poetry with meter and rhyme. And then I think it was in early college when I decided I wouldn’t be a good poet, and in a very sentimental move I threw out everything I had written by then. That was the end of my poetry career. And then I became interested in translation, and I started translating from English into Farsi. I published three collections of short stories in Farsi. Then I started writing my own fiction. I went to fiction workshops in Iran, then published a short story collection. It was a little before I came to Notre Dame, about 2010, when I founded an online literary journal. The goal was to translate and publish Persian fiction in English. I translated some fiction for that journal. But after some time, the team and I incorporated poetry and works from other languages also. So, I began translating poetry from Farsi into English.

 Once in the US, I started writing in English, and that meant that I lost a lot of the strength I had in my native language. I could do some gymnastics in Farsi that I couldn’t in English. When I’m looking back at my writing, my earlier fiction was lighter on plot and heavier on wordplay and language games. That is the effect of poetry I can detect on my earlier works. My writing is more plot-based now, more narrative heavy.

Ky:  You mentioned that you found a love of the novel as a form instead of the short story. […] Do you find yourself more comfortable with the opportunities it has for your writing process?

 Ali: It’s interesting, I didn’t think of myself as a novelist when I was in Iran. Maybe it was too intimidating, too large of a form to tackle. Maybe I didn’t see myself as a writer of that caliber. I wanted to come to the US to give myself the opportunity to really become a writer.

One thing I learned in my MFA program was that writing standards were different even with the mere word count people put on the page. I realized writers worked harder than I was used to. If I meant business in this new context of the American literary market, I had to be much more prolific. That was one change.

[Another] culture-specific difference was that in Iran you could be taken seriously as a writer with short stories. Here, I learned that even if you’re George Saunders, people will ask, “Where’s your novel?” It seemed a fiction writer was defined by their engagement with the novel. 

But other than those external factors, I was fascinated with the amount of time that the form gave me to explore the characters, to develop the world, and to immerse myself in it. The novel felt like a bigger challenge than a short story, and I love a good challenge. You have to create this large structure and cast of characters, setting, voice, POV. Everything has to make sense. Part of my love for the form comes from that challenge.

Visiting Assistant Professor Ali Araghi’s debut novel, The Immortals of Tehran, was published in 2020.

Ky:  Isn’t there a piece of your novel (The Immortals of Tehran) where when the character writes truer, more beautiful words, they start to burn on the page? That’s something that’s stuck with me since you spoke about it. And I’m thinking of it at the level of the word. You fit the plot of your novels together in a way that’s like building blocks, but then at the level of the word, if you get the exact word, do you ever think, “Oh, yes, this is what it’s meant to be. This is the correct line, this is the correct phrase?”

Ali: You can see part of my love for poetry in my novel. The main character is a poet. Poems can have literal effects on material and non-material things, like paper and revolutions. Yes, I’m always thinking about the right word. My thesaurus is always open. When I write or revise, I try to read for diction, but sentence structure, too, to create a kind of rhythm and cadence.

Ky: [Do you like revision, the lengthy part of the process, or do you just find yourself sitting in it more often than just writing and getting it on the page?]

Ali:  I used to hate revision, when I was a younger writer. I had to learn that writing is rewriting. Revision takes time, but it’s necessary. I go into the story without an outline, so my revisions take rather long, sometimes plot-level or structural-level. And that’s dreadful. I’m always excited about starting a new project, facing that blank page and trying to discover what the story is, what the plot is, who the characters are. That adrenalin rush as I explore is addictive.

Ky:  In your teaching, how do you frame revision? Is it more about your students getting their ideas on the page and playing around and fleshing them out, [or] does everyone write one thing and then spend the rest of the semester honing and rewriting it?

Ali: I do ask my students to revise stories and submit them for their final portfolio. But the main goal in my classes is to produce writing, more than revising. There are short lessons about revisions here and there, but not a lot. I mostly want to make my students excited about being able to create, rather than bog them down in a revision process that could go on and on. I want to instill the love and thrill of writing in my students. 

Ky: I’d like to ask about your teaching philosophy then, about what you feel is the most important part. I feel like you may have answered it in that you just want your students to get excited about the process, or maybe the act of creation, but if you could talk a bit more [about it]?

Ali: I think it is important for my students to learn how to read like a writer. You can’t take classes and attend workshops all your life. At some point you will have to learn how to teach yourself craft as you read other writers. To teach my students what to look for when they’re reading is one of my goals.

In my introductory class, we start by reading stories and introducing some elements of craft to the class (character, voice, plot, etc.), and we try to find how the stories we read handle those elements. We develop a shared language to discuss fiction. Some students are a little intimidated to write, to express themselves. We start with shorter exercises to break the ice. In the meantime, I emphasize that this is not a right-versus-wrong kind of class (as opposed to something like math or physics). I introduce the idea that fiction isn’t necessarily about truth as much as it’s about persuasion, and I also emphasize there is actual power in that.

Ky:  Final question: if you could teach a special topics course, or completely structure a course of your own making, what would it be?

 Ali: One of my dream courses is a fiction workshop where the writers are not native English speakers. The writers would come from and write in different languages. Parallel with that class, there is a translation workshop. Translators who work with these writers render their writings into English. A simpler version of this would be a course where writers mainly work in a language other than English, but they have some English so they can self-translate, and so we could workshop those works in the class. That’s one dream course.



Congratulations to the 2025 BA/MA Graduates!

On April 25, 2025, we celebrated nine BA/MA graduates who have earned their MA in creative writing. At the event, students read excerpts from their final projects

To begin, fiction writer Maria Pavlenko read from her thesis titled, Home Wherever You Are.

Maria Pavlenko

Claire Williams read from her collection of poetry, Going Back To The Body.

Claire Williams

Karysa Infante, who is also a poet, read from her thesis, Born Blue.

Karysa Infante

Matthew Ramos read a short story from his collection, Malegría.

Matthew Ramos

Ashleigh Earyes, a fiction writer, read a story from her thesis, Experience Being Human.

Ashleigh Earyes

Dana Lynch, who concentrates in nonfiction, read from her successful application to the MFA program at Columbia. Her essay collection is entitled, Thank You To My Parents.

Dana Lynch

Melissa Zavala, also a nonfiction writer, read an excerpt from her thesis, To Get That Far.

Melissa Zavala

Fiction writer Paige Harris read from her thesis titled, Apologies For Ghosts.

Paige Harris

Julianna Herriott, who concentrates in fiction, concluded the reading with an excerpt from her thesis, The Blackhall Effect.

Julianna Herriott

Congratulations, graduates! We will miss you and look forward to following your writing journeys.

Left to Right: Karysa Infante, Julianna Herriott, Ashleigh Earyes, Matthew Ramos, Dana Lynch, Maria Pavlenko, Claire Williams, Paige Harris, and Melissa Zavala.

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 2027 and said farewell to the wonderful Toby Thompson who has taught creative writing at Penn State for forty years.

Spring 2025 Visiting Writers and Next Year’s Lineup

To kick off the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series in the spring, Penn State Assistant Professor of Fiction, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, visited an advanced fiction class taught by Assistant Teaching Professor Ellen Skirvin. Students asked him questions about his short stories “The Tyrant” and “Adjustment of Status”, and Professor Kọ́láwọlé talked about how he focuses on morally ambiguous characters and wants to leave the reader with difficult questions. During his formal reading in the Foster Auditorium of the Paterno Library, he read excerpts from his novel The Road to the Salt Sea, which was published last summer, and discussed his process and considerations when writing it, including how the “personal is always political.” Since his reading, his novel won the 2025 Whiting Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the International Book Awards, was longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and became a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.

Samuel Kolowole’s award-winning novel, The Road To The Salt Sea

In February, the English department welcomed critically acclaimed author Kelly McMasters as its 2025 Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. During her week-long visit, McMasters met with students in the BA/MA program for workshops on craft and attended Professor Toby Thompson’s graduate workshop in creative nonfiction. She spoke to the importance of “making friends with one’s ghosts” through writing, and the complexities of sharing what is vulnerable and painful on the page. During a public reading later in the week, she read excerpts from her memoir The Leaving Season and discussed her journey as a writer, including the impact of becoming an English major in her undergraduate years. Steven Fisher, who began the annual Fisher Family visiting writer series with his family 30 years ago, also joined the events and met with McMasters and BA/MA students to discuss all things creative writing.

Kelly McMasters visiting Toby Thomspon’s Graduate Nonfiction Class and other BA/MA students
Kelly McMasters reading and discussing her work

Distinguished poet and essayist Adrienne Su visited campus as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series in March. During her visit, she attended a Q&A session with the graduate poetry class taught by Liberal Arts Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program Julia Spicher-Kasdorf. Su spoke about the tension between resisting the inclination to idealize the past in writing and the drive to capture the nostalgia for everyday things like shopping malls and family recipes before they disappeared. Later, she read from her collection Peach State to a packed crowd in the Foster Auditorium.

Adrienne Su reading her poetry in the Foster Auditorium

The final Mary E. Rolling Series event welcomed nationally renowned fiction writer Jamil Jan Kochai, who met with Visiting Assistant Professor in fiction Ali Araghi’s advanced fiction class for a Q&A. Kochai discussed how he often uses humor as a technique to encourage readers to rethink their political reality. While his stories include many characters, he said that he likes to give each character a breath of life and a chance to shine. During his public reading, he captivated the audience by reading the short story “Hungry Ricky Daddy” from his award-winning collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.

Jamil Jan Kochai reading “Hungry Ricky Daddy” from his collection

We are so thankful for the writers who visited us this year and for the continued support from the Fisher Family, the Mary E. Rolling Endowment, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the University Libraries, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

Please check out our lineup for next academic year’s visiting writers and mark your calendars!

 

2025 English Department Writing Awards Announced

On Monday, April 7, the English Department celebrated winners of the 2025 writing contests, as well as outstanding alumni and teachers, at its 2025 Spring Awards Ceremony.

Outstanding Alumni awards went to Dulce-Marie Flecha and Katherine Hazelrigg. Teaching and service awards went to Andrew Bode-Lang, Daniel Tripp, Amy Cooper White, Niyyah Jackson, and Claire Williams.

The full list of this year’s undergraduate and graduate writing award winners, as well as the names of judges, is on our 2025 writing contest winners’ page.

The undergraduate creative writing contests for 2026 are already open for submissions! The deadline to submit is January 26, 2026. Students can review contest guidelines and submit their work on the department’s writing contest page.

Penn Staters at AWP

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference was in Los Angeles from March 27-30th this year. Many Penn Staters were in attendance! Check out some familiar faces below.

Creative Writing Director, Julia Spicher Kasdorf with Aldon L. Nielsen, The George and Barbara Kelly Professor Emeritus, fumbling with his phone to snap a selfie in the hallway.

Professor of Creative Writing, Elizabeth Kadetsky with co-panelists for “From Submission to Page: A Day in the Life of a Literary Magazine Editor.” Left to right: Stephanie G’Schwind (Colorado Review), Gerald Maa (Georgia Review), Kyla Kupferstein Torres (Callaloo), Elizabeth Kadetsky (New England Review), and Emily Mitchell (New England Review).

PSU MFA grad Rachel Mennies speaks to a full room on the panel titled, “The Personal is Always Political.”
Ellen Skirvin, Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Penn State, poses at the West Virginia University Press table with the book she co-edited, This Book is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project.
PSU MFA grad, Kimberly Q. Andrews spotted by a potted palm, presented on a panel titled, “All Mixed Up: The Experience of Writing Mixed Race/Ethnicity”
Spotted in the hallway: Timothy Loperfido, fiction writer and PSU Assistant Teaching Professor of English.
PSU MFA and PhD, Geffrey Davis at the presenter’s table after a moving talk about his work with writers in an Arkansas prison on the panel, “The Sky Above the Roof: Community and Creativity in Carceral Environments”
Spotted on the streets of LA: PSU MFA grad Julie Swarstad Johnson in town for AWP with The University of Arizona Poetry Center, where she works.
Spotted in the Bookfair, PSU MFA grad Alyse Bensel with her new book, Spoil, Stephen F. Austin University Press.

We look forward to catching up with more Penn Staters next year at AWP in Baltimore!

Poetry Reading and Pedagogy Discussion from Stacey Waite

Stacey Waite, a poet, educator, and scholar, will offer a poetry reading and present a pedagogy talk in State College this month.

The poetry reading will take place on April 17 at 6:00pm in Webster’s Café. Waite, often considered a performance poet, has published five collections of poetry: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize in Poetry), Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition), the lake has no saint (winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize in Poetry), Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013), and the recently-released A Real Man Would Have A Gun (University of New Mexico Press 2025). Waite’s poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologized in a range of collections including Best American Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Literature.

The pedagogy discussion, “Making Trouble: Queer and Community-Based Pedagogies in the College Classroom,” will be held on April 18 at 3:00pm in 102 Burrowes Building. Stacey Waite, Associate Professor of English and Graduate Chair at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has published the scholarly book Teaching Queer (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Waite is co-editor of Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies and editor of Ways of Reading, and recognized as an accomplished scholar of composition, pedagogy, and community writing.

Find out more details about Stacey Waite and these events in the poster below.

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Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents Jamil Jan Kochai on April 10

Nationally renowned fiction writer, Jamil Jan Kochai, 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 10 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize.

His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New YorkerThe New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.

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Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presents Adrienne Su on March 20

Distinguished poet, Adrienne Su, 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, March 20 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), which was named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her first book of prose, the essay collection Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (Paul Dry Books, 2024), focuses on poetry and food.

Su’s poems, which have been described by Paisley Rekdal as “sky, smart, and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving,” appear in many anthologies, including six volumes of The Best American Poetry, as well as journals including Prairie Schooner, The Common, and The New Yorker. Among her awards are an NEA fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Frost Place, and Vermont Studio Center.

An Atlanta native, Adrienne Su lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing at Dickinson College.

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Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence Kelly McMasters to Read February 27

Critically acclaimed author Kelly McMasters will visit Penn State February 24-27 as this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. She will give a free public reading as part of her visit on Thursday, February 27 at 6 p.m. in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The American Scholar, Literary Hub, Newsday, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Romper, and The Rumpus, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others.

She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in New York.

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence program brings a well-known writer to campus each year to share their expertise and work with students in undergraduate creative writing classes and the graduate BA/MA creative writing program. The visit is funded primarily through the generosity of Steven Fisher, a 1970 Penn State graduate in English, with additional support from the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

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Out Loud in Bellefonte is Back! Now at The Print Factory

The first Out Loud in Bellefonte at the Print Factory event will take place on Friday, February 7 at 6 p.m. with the launch of a memoir and new collection of poems by distinguished Penn State professor Keith Gilyard.

A two-time American Book Award winner, Gilyard will read from The Promise of Language: A Memoir as well as forthcoming On Location: Poems. His vivid coming-of-age story, set against the rhythms of Black America’s vernacular language and music, recalls the Cold War Era, and Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Power movements. Always tuned into words, Gilyard brings his experiences and realizations to life with memories of barbershops, churches, schools, and his own emergence as a poet, scholar, and professor.

Organized by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Penn State University, Out Loud in Bellefonte was named for a line attributed to Émile Zola: “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” The project was initially inspired by Colina Seeley Colina (1928-2017), a local woman who also lived out loud.

At a meeting of the Bellefonte Historical and Cultural Association (BHCA) during the bitter January of 2013, Colina demanded, “We must have poetry!” Colina was a child resister of German occupation in her home in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where her father, an anthropology professor at the University, was targeted by the Nazis. As a young woman, she migrated to the United States to study social work, and went on to become a politically engaged social worker, mother, and wife of a Penn State chemistry professor who was also an immigrant. On the death of her first husband in the 1990s, Colina moved to Bellefonte and joined the BHCA.

From 2013 until 2020, BHCA sponsored Out Loud in Bellefonte at the Bellefonte Art Museum for Centre County. The range of events included literary readings, storytelling, and children’s readings. After the pandemic, Out Loud sponsored one poetry festival and one full season of readings hosted by St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Out Loud at The Print Factory will resume as a literary series with readings scheduled for the first Fridays of February, April, and May, then September, October, and November.  Mark your calendars for 6 pm on May 2, when Print Factory volunteer Huzaifa Malik will host a PSU student poetry reading in the Out Loud series.