Author Matthew Salesses 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  22, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. 

During his visit, Salesses will also participate in a panel discussion on “The Antiracist Classroom.” This event will be held on Wednesday February 21, 2024, 4:00 p.m, in the Grucci Room, 102 Burrowes Building, and is open to faculty across literature and writing disciplines.  

Matthew Salesses is a novelist, scholar, and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely about adoption, race, and parenting. He is the award-winning author of eight books, most recently a novel, “The Sense of Wonder” (2023) and a fiction writing guidebook, “Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping” (2021). Forthcoming is a memoir, “To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.” In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. Salesses is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.    

Salesses’ latest novel, “The Sense of Wonder,” was named on many “best of” lists, including The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. Ron Charles of The Washington Post characterizes the novel this way: “What Salesses does here is a remarkable feat of artistic prowess that somehow blends the themes of K-drama with the spectacle of sports drama in a way that resets our frame of reference for the Korean American experience. Indeed, it’s a move that doesn’t seem entirely possible until you see the jump yourself.”  

“The Antiracist Classroom” panel discussion on February 21, sponsored by the English Department’s Antiracism and Equity Committee, along with the Global Asias Initiative, will focus on creating just and equitable classroom environments through syllabus and course design, whether in the creative writing workshop or the literature or rhetoric classroom. The discussion will draw on insights from Salesses’ recent book “Craft in the Real World,” which challenges those teaching creative writing to look at traditional writing workshop practices with a fresh eye and an antiracist lens. As Book Page noted in its review, “The world has changed, and the writing workshop must catch up.”   

In addition to Matthew Salesses, the panel will feature William Germano and Kit Nicholls (coauthors of “Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything”). William Germano is professor of English at Cooper Union. His books include “Getting It Published” and “From Dissertation to Book.” Kit Nicholls is director of the Center for Writing at Cooper Union, where he teaches writing, literature, and cultural studies. Panelists will be in conversation with each other and with attendees.  

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.

Julianna Baggott will give a free public reading on Thursday, January 25, 6 pm, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Baggott has published over twenty books, some pseudonymously, including “Pure” and “Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders,” both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She heads the production company Mildred’s Moving Picture Show; her projects are in development at Disney+, Netflix, MGM, Paramount, Universal, and elsewhere.

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Nigerian-born writer Chika Unigwe 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, November 2, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Chika Unigwe has published four novels, including “On Black Sisters’ Street” (2011), which won the NLNG Prize for Literature worth $100,000; “De Zwarte Messias” (2014), a fictional rendition of the Nigerian memoirist Olaudah Equiano’s life; and a short story collection, “Better Never than Late” (2019). Her latest novel, “The Middle Daughter,” was published by Dzanc Books in April 2023. Her work has been widely translated.

Unigwe is currently a Professor at Georgia College, where she teaches in their MFA in Creative Writing program. She has served as Creative Director of the Awele Creative Trust, as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize (in 2016), and as Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University (in 2016-17). She has been the recipient of many fellowships and has earned numerous awards for her writing. Most notably, she won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for the short story “Borrowed Smile,” and was nominated for the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing for the short story “The Secret.” She writes a weekly column for the Nigerian Daily Trust.

About Unigwe’s latest novel, “The Middle Daughter,” Nigerian novelist Helon Habila observes: “Chika Unigwe’s modern retelling of the myth of Hades and Persephone is pitch perfect—it is a meditation on the need we all share for belonging, and family, and love; a commentary on the journey we must all take in search of freedom.”

(author photo credit:  Misan Harriman)

Nonfiction writer and poet Kelle Groom 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 12, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Kelle Groom is the author of four books of poetry and two books of nonfiction. Her first memoir, “I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl,” was named New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice in 2011. The book was also named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, Literary Journal Best Memoir, Barnes and Noble Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor’s pick. Her essays and poems have appeared in journals such as The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, AGNI, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among others.

Kelle Groom’s newest book is “How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays,” published by Tupelo Press in October 2023. Writer Nick Flynn characterizes the book this way: “Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her “Odyssey,” which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude.”

Groom was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe. Former poetry editor of The Florida Review, Groom is now a nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine. A long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she directed programs at the Fine Arts Work Center, she now lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where she is director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts.

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.

See:  full list of readings in the 2023-24 series.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will offer a reading at Penn State’s University Park campus as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21, in Freeman Auditorium in the HUB-Robeson Center.

Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012 to 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 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 also is the author of the memoir “Memorial Drive” (2020) and the nonfiction book “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010).

Other accolades for Trethewey include the 2020 Bobbitt Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2017 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category, and 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 also has 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. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 and served as State Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2012 to 2016. She is currently a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

Trethewey’s signature project during her second term as poet laureate 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 to explore societal issues such as Alzheimer’s disease, domestic abuse, the civil rights movement, and incarcerated teenagers — all through the prism of poetry, literature and Trethewey’s own personal experiences.

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.