The long-anticipated debut novel The Road to the Salt Sea by Penn State faculty member Samuel Kọ́láwọlé now has a cover!

Debutiful, a website/podcast dedicated to promoting debut authors, revealed the cover today in a news story that characterizes the book this way:

“The Road to the Salt Sea is the forthcoming debut novel from Nigerian writer Samuel Kọ́láwọlé likened to the works of Omar El Akkad and Mohsin Hamid’s. Set to release on July 2 from Amistad Press [an imprint of HarperCollins], the novel follows a lowly hotel worker whose life collides with a sex work and a dangerous guest. Throughout Kọ́láwọlé explores the Nigerian class system and how fate and fortune are fickle things.”

Read more about the book and the cover design here on Debutiful…. 

Pre-order a copy of The Road to the Salt Sea here!

This event has been canceled due to unexpected developments.
Plans for rescheduling are still in the works.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Pulitzer Prize-winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will offer a reading at Penn State as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer. The reading will be held in the Freeman Auditorium in the HUB-Robeson Center on Thursday, September 29 at 6:00 pm. This reading is free and open to the public.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). 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 was the first Southerner to receive the honor since Robert Penn Warren, in 1986, and the first African-American since Rita Dove, in 1993.

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 is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010.

Among her many honors, Trethewey is the recipient of the 2020 Bobbitt Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a 2017 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category, as well as 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 has also 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. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

In her second term as United States Poet Laureate, Trethewey’s signature project 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 in order to explore societal issues such as Alzheimer’s, domestic abuse, the civil rights movement, and incarcerated teenagers—all through the prism of poetry, literature, and Trethewey’s own personal experiences.

In addition to being United States Poet Laureate, she held the position of State Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2012-2016.

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.

Penn State associate professor of fiction and nonfiction Elizabeth Kadetsky will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. Free and open to the public, the reading will be held in Foster Auditorium in Paterno Library on Thursday, November 4, at 7:00 pm, as well as livestreamed.   

A two-time Fulbright scholar to India and a 30-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, Elizabeth Kadetsky published her first book, the memoir “First There is a Mountain” (2004), after researching and studying with the yogi BKS Iyengar in Pune, India. Kadetsky’s most recent book, “The Memory Eaters,” a lyric memoir from University of Massachusetts Press (April 2020), was the winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She has also published the novella “On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World” (Nouvella, 2015) and the short story collection “The Poison That Purifies You” (C&R Press, 2014).  Her short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a nonfiction editor at New England Review.  

A memoir-in-essays, “The Memory Eaters” illuminates Kadetsky’s battles with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, her sister’s addiction, and her family’s secrets. It was named among “great books from small presses to read now” by Buzzfeed when it was released near the start of the COVID pandemic in April 2020, and was featured in the Boston Globe, The Rumpus, She Reads, and elsewhere. The book’s epigraph offers a verse from “The Odyssey,” wherein Homer’s Lotus Eaters lapse into forgetfulness after eating the addictive fruit, a state the book’s title echoes. ” ‘The Memory Eaters’ functions as love letters to single mothers, to New York City of the ’70s and ’80s, to the fashion industry, to graffiti artists, and to Kadetsky’s own mother, of course,” notes reviewer Jeff Parker. Author Paisley Rekdal commends the way “Kadetsky’s nuanced essays explore the complicated contradictions inherent to memory, how memory holds us captive to our familial wounds, while at the same time helping us preserve the stories, and presences, of those we love.” 

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. 

We welcomed 10 new students into the BA/MA program this fall to join the 8 students continuing into their second year. They come from places as far away as Hawaii and Texas, although most call Pennsylvania home. From fantastical realism to poetry to realistic non-fiction, these students each have their own artistic style. They also enjoy many other things beyond writing, such as graphic design, painting, baking, playing music, or just spending time with their pets. Check out the profiles of our first and second year BA/MA students on the “Student Bios” page!