The next Hometown Voices reading will feature Penn State creative writing faculty, Joe Bueter and Elizabeth Foulke, on Sunday, December 3, at 3pm at Tempest Studios (140 Kelly Alley, State College). See attached flyer and please share!
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Congratulations to creative writing professor Elizabeth Kadetsky, whose essay “The Goddess Complex” was recently published in the March 2, 2023, issue of American Scholar. As the magazine explains: “A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking.” Professor Kadetsky has pursued this research across two Fulbright Fellowships to India, and she has been a clear and thoughtful voice on an issue that is gaining a great deal of traction in the antiquities art world.
Creative writing professor Toby Thompson‘s essay “Honkytonk Hawkin'” was published recently by the University Press of Mississippi as the lead essay in the collection, Rags and Bones: An Exploration of The Band (November 2022). Toby’s essay examines The Band’s genesis as a bar band and how that experience shaped their music.
The press describes the collection this way: “In Rags and Bones: An Exploration of The Band, scholars and musicians take a broad, multidisciplinary approach to The Band and their music, allowing for examination through sociological, historical, political, religious, technological, cultural, and philosophical means. Each contributor approaches The Band from their field of interest, offering a wide range of investigations into The Band’s music and influence.”
Congratulations to Professor Thompson!
On Friday, January 27, at 7 pm, The Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg will host the book launch of poet and Penn State professor Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s new new poetry collection, As Is. This free in-person event is open to the public and will include a reading, audience Q&A, and book signing. The event is also available for streaming.
Click here to watch this event via YouTube Live.
For more information on the event, the location, the poet, and the book, visit the Midtown Scholar Bookstore and Cafe Events page.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Fiction writer and Penn State assistant 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 26, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, Kọ́láwọle studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. His fiction has been supported with numerous fellowships, residencies, and scholarships, and he was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, shortlisted for UK’s The First Novel Prize in 2019, and won a 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers.
Kọ́láwọlé has taught creative writing in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States. A graduate of the MFA program in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the faculty of the low-residency MFA program. In 2022, he joined the creative writing faculty at Penn State.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel “The Road to Salt Sea” is forthcoming from Amistad / Harper Collins. Set along the trans-Saharan migration route, from Nigeria to Libya, the novel explores the current global migration crisis. It follows Rufus Tacitus, a hopeful university graduate turned accidental murderer, on an unrelenting journey of escape across the continent to the Italian coast. Bestselling author Julianna Baggott says of the novel: “I cannot think of another time in my life when I have come across a new writer as profoundly talented as Samuel Kọ́láwọlé. And his profound talent has brought us a beautifully rendered, brutal novel told with great empathy and heart. ‘The Road to Salt Sea’ has all of the markings of a masterful and enduring work of literature. And I get the feeling that Kọ́láwọlé is just warming up.”
More on Samuel Kọ́láwọlé can be found on his website: samuelkolawoleauthor.com
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. A full list of readings in the 2022-23 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.
Professor of English & Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Charlotte Holmes joined the faculty at Penn State in 1987. Throughout her 35 years here, she served as thesis director for over 40 MFA writing students and acted as second reader for over 25 additional MFA students. She directed scores of undergraduate honors theses and graduate BA/MA theses. A significant number of these students have gone on to publish their writing and/or teach creative writing themselves.
Holmes directed the Creative Writing Program at Penn State from 2013-2020 and served as MFA Program Director from 1994-1997, as well as Acting Director in 2003. She has won many awards for her teaching, service, and writing. From Penn State, she received the George Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Stephanie J. Pavoucek Shields Faculty Award for the Mentoring of Women, the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Advising Award, and the College of Liberal Arts Award for Outstanding Teaching by Tenure-Line Faculty.
Charlotte Holmes’s collection of short fiction, The Grass Labyrinth, published in March 2016 by BkMk Press, received both the Gold Medal for the Short Story from the Independent Publishers Association (the IPPY) and the Gold Medal for the Short Story from Foreward magazine. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Antioch Review, Epoch, Grand Street, Narrative, New Letters, The New Yorker, and other magazines, and her poems in American Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, The Women’s Review of Books, and other journals. Her work has been cited for excellence in the O.Henry Prize Stories anthology, Best American Stories, and Best American Essays, and anthologized in After O’Connor: Contemporary Georgia Writers and in two volumes of New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best. The recipient of a Writer’s Exchange fellowship from Poets & Writers, she has also received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, two Pennsylvania Arts Council Fellowships, the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, a travel fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.
Professor Holmes’ contributions and impact during her long tenure at Penn State have been monumental.
We wish her a well-earned retirement with her husband, the poet and former Penn State professor James Brasfield, on the coast of Maine.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Liberal Arts Professor of English, designed and taught a course during the spring 2022 semester, entitled “Reading and Writing Place in Central Pennsylvania.”
Funded by the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence in Penn State Undergraduate Education, the course has students read literature set in or describing life in Centre County; they then engaged with their coursework through field trips. Texts in a variety of genres spanned from the 19th century all the way to the 2006 graphic memoir “Fun Home, set in the author’s childhood home in nearby Beech Creek, which the class visited.
Read more about the experience on Penn State News.
Funding from the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence allowed students in the course ENGL 411 to visit sites in Centre County, including Eagle Iron Works and Curtin Village, Bellefonte and Aaronsburg (pictured), among others. Photo credit: Julia Spicher Kasdorf. All Rights Reserved.
We are delighted to announce that fiction writer Samuel Kọ́láwọlé will join the creative writing faculty as an assistant professor in the English Department at Penn State this fall!
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel The Road to Salt Sea is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Consequence, and is forthcoming from Harvard Review.
His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute.
Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the MFA in Writing faculty. He is working towards his Ph.D. at Georgia State University.
Here’s a sampling of Kọ́láwọlé’s writing, a story entitled “Sweet sweet strawberry taste,” published in AGNI (April 2019).
Welcome, Samuel!
Penn State poet, professor, and Penn State Laureate Shara McCallum will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, February 3. Originally scheduled as in-person, this event will no longer be offered in-person. Instead, you can join Shara for a reading and discussion of her most recent book, No Ruined Stone, by joining the Zoom event (set up as an interactive meeting rather than webinar). Registration is required in advance, and you can register here.
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK, including “No Ruined Stone” (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. “La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room,” an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz.
Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for her previous book, “Madwoman”), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for her first book, “The Water Between Us”).
“No Ruined Stone” imagines what might have happened if poet Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland in 1786, as planned, to take a job on a slave plantation in Jamaica. According to poet Adrian Matejka, “the book mythologizes the poet Robert Burns and his imagined Jamaican descendants through a chorus of intergenerational voices. This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer’s most insidious tools and McCallum’s gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism.”
McCallum has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. During her tenure as Laureate, McCallum is delivering readings & events throughout the Commonwealth, US, & internationally, in person and virtually, and is hosting the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU.
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.
Shara McCallum, liberal arts professor of English in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, has been named Penn State Laureate for the 2021-22 academic year.
An annual faculty honor established in 2008, the Penn State Laureate is a full-time faculty member in the arts or humanities who is assigned half time for one academic year to bring greater visibility to the arts, humanities and the University, as well as to their own work. In this role, the laureate is a highly visible representative of the University, appearing at events and speaking engagements throughout the commonwealth.
Read more in Penn State News about the laureate’s role, McCallum’s artistic focus and achievements, as well as her plans for the laureate year.
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