UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Novelist and essayist Xu Xi will offer a reading at Penn State 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 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Xu is a former Indonesian national of Chinese descent from Hong Kong who became a U.S. national at the age of 33. An author of 15 books — five novels, nine collections of fiction and essays, and one memoir — she is considered one of Hong Kong’s leading writers in English. She also edited five anthologies of Asian and Hong Kong writing. Recent titles include “The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology” (Bloomsbury, 2021); “This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being” (Nebraska 2019); “Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories” (Signal 8, 2018); “Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City” (Penguin, 2017); and the novel “That Man in Our Lives” (C&R, 2016).

Xu’s latest new collection, “Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations” (Signal 8 Press), is scheduled to be released in November 2022. Writer Antony Dapiran characterizes the forthcoming collection as “‘speculations’ [that] weave between fact and fiction, from personal essay to short story, memoir to satire, as elusive and allusive as her playful, slippery sentences.”

About Xu’s most recent essay collection, “This Fish is Fowl,” writer Robin Hemley observes: “To read these smart, inventive, and always surprising essays is to be given a passport to a transnational perspective the world sorely needs at this moment. Xu Xi’s sense of identity: Indonesian/Chinese/American/Hong Kong is not mixed up (though she likes to label herself a ‘mongrel’), but expansive. Identity for her has almost nothing to do with borders but with a kind of echolocation — sending forth her speculations on what it means to be a traveler, a daughter, a life partner, a woman in order to determine a shifting but remarkable path through geographies of being.”

Xu currently holds the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and is a founding partner of Authors at Large Inc. She previously co-directed the international master of fine arts in creative writing and literary translation in prose program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she was writer-in-residence at City University of Hong Kong, where she established the first low-residency MFA in creative writing in Asia.

A diehard transnational, Xu long inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. Prior to 1998, she had an 18-year corporate career in marketing and management and held positions at several multinationals in the U.S. and Asia, including The Asian Wall Street Journal, Leo Burnett Advertising, Federal Express, Pinkerton’s and Cathay Pacific Airways. She now splits her life between the state of New York and the rest of the world.

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 — Award-winning essayist and poet Paisley Rekdal will visit Penn State as the Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence during the week of March 14-18. As part of her visit, Rekdal will give a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 17, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. The in-person event also will be available via livestream; those interested in attending virtually must register in advance. 

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee”; the hybrid-genre photo-text memoir “Intimate”; the book-length essay “The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam”; and a book on cultural appropriation in literature titled “Appropriate: A Provocation”, published by W.W. Norton in February 2021.  She is also the author of six books of poetry: “A Crash of Rhinos,” “Six Girls Without Pants,” “The Invention of the Kaleidoscope,” “Animal Eye,” “Imaginary Vessels” and “Nightingale.”  

A two-time finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize, her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship and inclusion in five editions of the Best American Poetry series. She guest edited “The Best American Poetry 2020” anthology. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio, among others. A Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, Rekdal is currently serving as Utah’s poet laureate.  

In her most recent prose book, “Appropriate: A Provocation” (2021), Rekdal answers the question: “When is it appropriate to culturally appropriate in creative writing?” The Los Angeles Times describes the book and Rekdal’s treatment of this current, contentious issue this way: “framed as a series of letters to a white student, X, who has written a poem partly in the voice of an older Black person…. The letters investigate whether it is possible to successfully write across race, cases of racial impostors and interlopers, the nature of whiteness and much more…. As a woman of mixed white and Chinese descent, Rekdal has been both outsider and insider, has experienced both othering and privilege.” 

In her most recent collection of poems, “Nightingale” (2019), Rekdal re-writes and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, “The Metamorphoses.” The book won the Washington State Book Award and was named a Washington Post “Best Poetry Collection” selection and an NPR “Best of 2019” selection. The New York Journal of Books writes that the collection “explores what few writers since Ovid have reminded us: metamorphosis is a violent act, requiring dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation before we can become something new.” 

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence is also sponsored by the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of Liberal Arts. The reading is free and open to the public.  

(NOTE: In accordance with Penn State policy, all individuals are required to wear face masks inside all campus buildings, regardless of their vaccination status.) 

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. 

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/.