UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Poet Abby Minor will offer a reading at Penn State as the final event in this year’s Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Abby Minor’s first book, As I Said: A Dissent (Ricochet Editions, 2022), is a collection of long documentary poems concerning reproductive rights, embodiment, justice, and citizenship in U.S. history. It is a book described by poet and Penn State professor Julia Spicher Kasdorf as filled with “lines that dance and leap, each a necessary testament to a life planted in the ridges of Appalachia and reaching back to the nits of New York tenements.” Minor is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Real Words for Inside (Gap Riot Press) and Plant Light, Dress Light (dancing girl press). Awarded Bitch Media’s 2018 Writing Fellowship in Sexual Politics, she has received residencies and awards from Split this Rock, The Rensing Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, The Penland School of Crafts, the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust. She earned her MFA in creative writing at Penn State.

Abby Minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where she works on poems, essays, drawings, and projects exploring reproductive politics. Since 2017, she has worked as the founding director of Ridgelines Language Arts, a non-profit providing expert language arts instruction outside of academic institutions and to those who are marginalized in the region. Through Ridgelines, she also teaches poetry workshops in her county’s low-income nursing homes. Minor currently serves as a board member of Abortion Conversation Projects and collaborates widely with other organizations and activists.

The April 13 reading will begin with a “choreopoem” performance (including live music and choreographed dance) and continue with readings from As I Said. All of the poems presented will revolve around themes of reproductive rights and politics.

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.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Nonfiction writer and Penn State grad Krista Eastman 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, February 23, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.  

Krista Eastman is the author of “The Painted Forest,” which was named one of the best literary nonfiction debuts of 2019 by Poets & Writers magazine. “The Painted Forest” also won the Council for Wisconsin Writers’ Nonfiction Book Award and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review and have been named Notable in Best American Essays. 

Eastman was born and raised in the Driftless hills of Wisconsin. After living in Senegal, France, Antarctica, and the eastern U.S., she returned to Wisconsin where she lives with her partner and young son. Eastman earned her master of fine arts (MFA) in creative writing at Penn State. 

West Virginia University Press, publisher of “The Painted Forest,” characterizes the book of essays this way: “Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from… uncovers strange and little-known ‘home places’—not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the ‘under-imagined and overly caricatured’ Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance.” Reviewer Caryl Pagel calls it a “a surprising and tender book in which a reader might be reminded of the considered natural observations of Annie Dillard, the unrelenting gaze of Lia Purpura, or the masterful storytelling of Jo Ann Beard. Eastman is interested in interrogating the history and ethos of several specific places…as well as elegantly demonstrating the ways in which landscapes shift and morph through generations and recall.”