Stacey Waite, a poet, educator, and scholar, will offer a poetry reading and present a pedagogy talk in State College this month.

The poetry reading will take place on April 17 at 6:00pm in Webster’s Café. Waite, often considered a performance poet, has published five collections of poetry: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize in Poetry), Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition), the lake has no saint (winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize in Poetry), Butch Geography (Tupelo Press, 2013), and the recently-released A Real Man Would Have A Gun (University of New Mexico Press 2025). Waite’s poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologized in a range of collections including Best American Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Literature.

The pedagogy discussion, “Making Trouble: Queer and Community-Based Pedagogies in the College Classroom,” will be held on April 18 at 3:00pm in 102 Burrowes Building. Stacey Waite, Associate Professor of English and Graduate Chair at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has published the scholarly book Teaching Queer (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Waite is co-editor of Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies and editor of Ways of Reading, and recognized as an accomplished scholar of composition, pedagogy, and community writing.

Find out more details about Stacey Waite and these events in the poster below.

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Nationally renowned fiction writer, Jamil Jan Kochai, 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, April 10 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize.

His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.

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Distinguished poet, Adrienne Su, 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, March 20 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Adrienne Su is the author of five books of poems, most recently Peach State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), which was named a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her first book of prose, the essay collection Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet (Paul Dry Books, 2024), focuses on poetry and food.

Su’s poems, which have been described by Paisley Rekdal as “sky, smart, and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving,” appear in many anthologies, including six volumes of The Best American Poetry, as well as journals including Prairie Schooner, The Common, and The New Yorker. Among her awards are an NEA fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Frost Place, and Vermont Studio Center.

An Atlanta native, Adrienne Su lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she is professor of creative writing at Dickinson College.

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Critically acclaimed author Kelly McMasters will visit Penn State February 24-27 as this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. She will give a free public reading as part of her visit on Thursday, February 27 at 6 p.m. in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The American Scholar, Literary Hub, Newsday, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Romper, and The Rumpus, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others.

She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in New York.

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence program brings a well-known writer to campus each year to share their expertise and work with students in undergraduate creative writing classes and the graduate BA/MA creative writing program. The visit is funded primarily through the generosity of Steven Fisher, a 1970 Penn State graduate in English, with additional support from the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of the Liberal Arts.

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Each month, Tempest Studios (140 Kelly Alley in State College) hosts local writers in its Hometown Voices Performance & Reading Series.

Check out the lineup for Spring 2025:

• POSTPONED: Sunday, January 19, 3pm: Abby Minor & Todd Davis
• Sunday, February 16, 3pm: Erin Murphy & Jared Conti
• Sunday, March 16, 3pm: Erica Quinn & Brad Baumgartner
• Sunday, April 27, 3pm: Nicole Miyashiro & Mary Rohrer-Dann

Todd Davis has a new book, Ditch Memory. So does Erin Murphy: Fluent in Blue. Abby Minor’s most recent book, As I Said: A Dissent, came out in 2022, as did Brad Baumgartner’s most recent, Dead Man’s Switch. Mary Rohrer-Dann’s most recent book, Accidents of Being, came out in 2023.

Questions about the Hometown Voices series? Email Rachael Wiley at rwiley@psu.edu.

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Award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky will offer a reading as the twenty-fourth annual Emily Dickinson Lecture in American Poetry. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 21 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S. in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

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During a visit to Penn State through the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series on September 19, award-winning fiction writer Jai Chakrabarti came to Professor Kọ́láwọlé’s graduate fiction-writing class to talk about specifics on craft, process, and his writing.

He also held a public reading, where he read the short story “The Fortunes of Others” from his collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness and answered questions from the audience. Find out more about the reading in an article from The Daily Collegian by Emily Lin.

Our next event will be a reading by the writer Sherrie Flick on October 10 at 6:00pm in the Foster Auditorium of the Paterno Library.