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.
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!
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.
Critically acclaimed fiction writer and Penn State Creative Writing Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé 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, January 30 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of a new novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, a finalist for the International Book Awards and currently longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize.
His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal, and other literary publications.
He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, and the UK’s The First Novel Prize. He won an Editor-Writer Mentorship Program Award for Diverse Writers.
He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and holds a Master of Arts degree in creative writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is a graduate of the MFA in writing and publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and creative writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden, and the United States and was visiting faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Creative Writing.
He currently teaches fiction writing as an assistant professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is also a faculty member in the low-residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
The Department of English is co-sponsoring a film screening of Castles in the Sky (a 30-minute short film) directed by Pearl Gluck, Penn State Associate Professor of Film Production, on September 5 from 3:30-5:00pm.
The film depicts Malke, a Holocaust survivor and beloved sex-ed teacher living in a cloistered Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Malke has a secret life slamming poetry in New York’s Lower East Side, defying all communal norms and laws until her transgressive pursuits are discovered by one of her bridal students. Is Malke willing to risk it all for her poetry?
Creative Writing director Julia Spicher Kasdorf makes a brief cameo appearance in the film, reciting a poem she performed in the Nuyorican Poets Café back in the 1990s. Following the film screening, Kasdorf will take part in a conversation about cross-cultural conversations and art-making with the film’s director Professor Pearl Gluck, along with and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, a poet, writer, and translator who grew up in the Hasidic community, moderated by Penn State Sparks Professor of English Shara McCallum.
Please see the attached poster for more details about the event.
Penn State Creative Writing Professor Elizabeth Kadetsky received a Public Scholars fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to work for one year to complete her book about the stolen matrika sculptures and the culture of exploitation that contributed to their theft in southwest Rajasthan in 1962.
The NEH Public Scholars grants support popular nonfiction books in the humanities and will enable publication of 25 new titles this year, including Professor Kadetsky’s book. Find out more about the Public Scholars grant and the other supported projects here.
Professor Kadetsky also recently published the powerful new personal narrative essay “We Are Here Now” featured in the Colorado Review.
Penn State Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé published his critically acclaimed debut novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, in July of 2024. It is a searing exploration of the global migration crisis that moves from Nigeria to Libya to Italy.
The Kirkus Review says the novel “opens like a thriller” and continues as a “bracing, well-paced story of migrant desperation.” Okey Ndibe calls it “groundbreaking” and that it “brings a stalwart heart to the prospect of a fresh beginning.”
Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania hosted the book launch, where Kọ́láwọlé had an engaging conversation with Messiah University Professor, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, preceding an audience Q&A. Kọ́láwọlé discussed his inspiration and process for writing the book, including how he chose character names like Able God and Ben Ten. He spoke about wanting to portray real, vivid, complex characters who have various reasons for making the dangerous Trans-Saharan migrant route from their homes.
Kọ́láwọlé recently wrote in The Guardian about Africa’s migration crisis and the need to publish more books about it. He stresses that, “Literature has the power to change the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. This is my way of imploring you not to look away – to see migrants in all of their humanity. It’s me shouting from the rooftops that African lives matter.”
Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé will have a book celebration event at Webster’s Bookstore in State College, Pennsylvania on September 27 at 6:00pm. He will also have a reading and book signing at Penn State on January 30 as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. To find out more about Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, The Road to the Salt Sea, and his book tour, visit his website.
Julia Kasdorf with WCoNA Founder and President PJ Piccirillo.
At its 2024 conference, held March 15-16 at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA, the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) honored professor and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf with its annual Outstanding Contribution Award.
The purpose of the award is “to recognize an individual, ensemble, team or organization whose contributions or body of literary work have furthered the WCoNA mission to honor the region’s distinct literature, or, by extension, its people, and/or whose contributions enhance or have enhanced the craft of our authors, inspiring new work that represents northern Appalachia, the region of the Appalachia counties of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and the northern portion of West Virginia.”
At the conference’s closing ceremony, WCoNA Founder and President PJ Piccirillo read the following tribute to Kasdorf, written by WCoNA Board of Directors memberKimberly McElhatten, who nominated her for the award.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf‘s body of work and literary citizenship go beyond honoring the northern Appalachia canon. They advocate for it–its land, its animals, its plants, its people, its cultures, its diversity, and its stories to be heard.
In her early career, she focused on preserving and elevating Amish and Mennonite voices in the northern Appalachian canon. Kasdorf wrote the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (Cascadia, 2002). Yoder was the first to transcribe Amish hymns, which had only been preserved orally until then. He additionally wrote Rosanna of the Amish, claimed to be a true story of his mother’s life, in an effort to counter the false and negative literary representations of Amish culture depicted in Amish romances from the early 1900s until the 1930s—a work that has remained in print since 1940 and has sold over 500,000 copies.
At Messiah College, Kasdorf started the campus’ first literary series open to the public and doubled its budget. She also served as the faculty advisor for the campus literary magazine. At Penn State, she introduced the “The Writer in the Community” course and trained MFA students to teach in non-academic settings, such as long-term care facilities, community youth centers, jails, teen shelters, and beyond. This program continues as the non-profit Ridgelines Language Arts, founded and co-directed by one of her former MFA advisees, Abby Minor.
In her 24 years as a professor at Penn State, Kasdorf has directed the English Department’s MFA program and now the Creative Writing Program and has contributed to numerous community-facing literary projects, including the Public Poetry Project (formerly sponsored by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book), Centre County Reads, and the Favorite Poem Project of State College. She’s served on the editorial review team at Penn State Press. She is currently the faculty advisor of the Creative Writing Club at PSU.
In collaboration with graduate student Josh Brown, she published a new edition of Fred Lewis Pattee’s novel, The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains, set in late 19th century northern Appalachia, an effort that helps preserve Pattee’s legacy as the founder of American literary study, but also the post-Civil War cultural, social, and emotional landscape unique to northern Appalachia.
Additionally, Kasdorf contributes to communities and organizations beyond State College and PSU, including the popular reading series “Out Loud in Bellefonte.” She’s also served as a Public Humanities Council Commonwealth Speaker. In collaboration with community and university artists, she conceived and wrote lyrics for the musical performance and filmed oral histories about the invention of the folding and portable Ferris wheel in Centre Hall, PA, first performed as “aMUSEment: Play in the Workshop” and later as “Bright Toys of Summer: Garbrick Amusements from the Workshop to the Fair.”
Most recently, she helped coordinate a local history project to research and make visible the significant 19th and 20th-century Black history in Centre County. On this project, she mentored the writing of and produced a staged reading and musical performance of a play based on that research, “Finding Home: Adeline Lawson Graham, Colored Citizen of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.”
She’s a regular instructor at Chatham University’s Summer Community of Writers and regularly teaches at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center.
Most importantly, her mentorship extends beyond the classroom and public eye, offering emerging writers valuable mentorship, guidance, and support on their journey to successful publishing and academic careers, many of whom are also doing good, important work across northern Appalachia at our universities and colleges, elevating and diversifying our literary representation. Through these efforts, Julia Spicher Kasdorf has become an integral part of our region’s literary community and canon.
In addition to her legacy as an influential literary citizen of northern Appalachia, Kasdorf is a documentary poet who records and preserves our diverse stories with a keen eye on the impact of industry, war, and politics on our people.
Most notably, her book Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, along with her work in progress that will document agricultural resilience within thirty miles of her home in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, captures her commitment to our narratives. Her meticulous documentation does more than tell our stories; it enhances the craft of authors across northern Appalachia, influencing and inspiring the future of our literary canon.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf has emerged as a distinguished voice in American poetry, especially renowned for her vivid portrayal of the Ridge and Valley region of northern Appalachia. Kasdorf’s influence extends beyond her poetry; she is a pillar in the educational and artistic communities of northern Appalachia.
Her work and influence reach into our universities, communities, and beyond with twenty-one features on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and publications in esteemed magazines like Prairie Schooner, the Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. This broad recognition is a testament to her skill in capturing the essence of our region in her poetry.
–WCoNA Board of Directors memberKimberly McElhatten
WCoNA’s Outstanding Contribution Award comes with a donation of $300 in the name of the award winner, given to an organization or institution serving to broaden literacy within some part of northern Appalachia. Julia has selected Ridgelines Language Arts as the recipient of this year’s award funds. Ridgelines is a Bellefonte-based organization founded and co-directed by Abby Minor, a former student of Julia’s in Penn State’s MFA program in creative writing.
Ridgelines “provides expert language arts instruction to those who are underserved in the rural ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. We teach language arts—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.”
Congratulations to Julia for this well-deserved recognition!
Penn State professor Julia Spicher Kasdorf and former colleague C.S. Giscombe will offer a poetry reading and discussion as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading is free and open to the public and will be held at 6 pm on Thursday, March 21 in Foster Auditorium in Paterno Library.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf teaches poetry and directs the creative writing program at Penn State. She is the author of five poetry collections, including “Sleeping Preacher,” “Eve’s Striptease,” “Poetry in America,” and “Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields,” a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer and Penn State professor Steven Rubin. Her newest book of poems, “As Is,” was published in 2023 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
C.S. Giscombe lived for a decade in State College and Bellefonte while he taught creative writing at Penn State. He currently teaches poetry at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English. His prose and poetry books include “Prairie Style,” “Ohio Railroads” (a long poem in the form of an essay), “Border Towns,” and “Similarly” (selected poetry and new work). His newest book, “Negro Mountain,” was called one of the best poetry collections of 2023 by The New York Times.
Both Kasdorf’s and Giscombe’s most recent projects meditate on and explore the idea of place, specifically the mountains in the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania. Of Kasdorf’s book “As Is,” reviewer Sofia Samatar writes: “Her poems bear witness to rough, hardscrabble places, the labor of those who live there, and histories on the verge of dissolving in a rapidly changing environment.” Giscombe’s “Negro Mountain” is titled after the long ridge of the Allegheny Mountains straddling the Pennsylvania border with Maryland, the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania. According to The University of Chicago Press, the name “Negro Mountain” comes from “an ‘incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century; this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection.”
The Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) is coming to Saint Francis University in Loretto, PA, Friday, March 15, through Saturday, March 16. The program features 25 workshops and presentations on topics including poetry, voice, developing a sense of place, screenwriting, marketing your book, publishing, Appalachian heritage and history, character development, and memoir.
The event, focused on building recognition for the region’s literature and helping its writers hone their craft, kicks off with an open mic on Friday evening. During the Friday evening opening, USA Today best-selling author David Poyer will offer a special presentation on writing in the age of AI.
Saturday’s conference sessions will begin with a keynote by Maxwell King. After a distinguished career as editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, King served as president of The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. He has written a poetry collection, Crossing Laurel Run, followed by the New York Times-bestselling biography, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. Most recently, Mr. King published American Workman: The Life and Art of John Kane, a book about a man whose experience in northern Appalachia typifies the misunderstood and overlooked voices of the region.
Presentations and workshops will be offered in four sessions throughout the day Saturday. Penn State faculty members Julia Spicher Kasdorf (Director of Creative Writing) and Alison Jaenicke (Assistant Director of Creative Writing) will co-lead a workshop called “Writing Y/our Roots in Northern Appalachia” on Saturday afternoon.
WCoNA invites participating authors to sign and sell books at the conference’s book sale. Attendees will have opportunities to network and establish new relationships based on the common appreciation for the literature of northern Appalachia.
According to WCoNA founder and president PJ Piccirillo, a novelist from Elk County, the contributions of writers interpreting life in northern Appalachia have been underrecognized, though the region’s people, places, cultures, and landscapes are as rich as those that have given rise to renowned literary traditions. “We believe the stories, poems, and essays inspired by our experiences deserve to be represented and valued as a body of work,” Piccirillo said. “To increase access to this outstanding literature, we’re building a brand for our writers among booksellers, agents, publishers and, most importantly, readers.”
Registration is open with early-bird pricing through February 15 at www.wcona.com. Sponsorships are also available.
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The Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) is coming to Saint Francis University in Loretto, PA, Friday, March 15, through Saturday, March 16. The program features 25 workshops and presentations on topics including poetry, voice, developing a sense of place, screenwriting, marketing your book, publishing, Appalachian heritage and history, character development, and memoir.
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