Award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer Jennifer Vanderbes will give a reading on Thursday, March 14, as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The event will be held at 7:30 pm in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

A former Guggenheim fellow, Jennifer Vanderbes is the author of three novels: The Secret of Raven Point (2014), Strangers at the Feast (2010), and Easter Island (2003). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Granta and The Atlantic. Her forthcoming nonfiction book, The Gatekeeper, about the thalidomide scandal of the 1960s, has been awarded a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and will be published by Random House and HarperCollins UK. Vanderbes’ work has been translated into 16 languages.

Vanderbes’ first novel, Easter Island, was named a “Best Book of 2003” by The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. Of her most recent novel, The Secret of Raven Point, Kirkus Reviews writes: “Part mystery, part coming-of-age tale, part World War II novel, Vanderbes’…moving latest novel…is an empathetic, oblique take on the layers of damage done during war…unusual and affecting.”

Jennifer Vanderbes received her B.A. in English Literature from Yale and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives in New York City.

Kimiko Hahn, this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence, will read from her work on Wednesday, February 27, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium at 7:30 pm.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poems, including: Brain Fever (2014) and Toxic Flora (2010), both collections prompted by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006) a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (1996), which received an American Book Award; and the award-winning Earshot (1992). Since initiating the annual NYU/CUNY Chapbook Festival, now in its seventh year, Hahn has added chapbooks to her publication list. Chicago Review of Books characterizes Hahn’s most recent chapbook, Brood (2018), as “poetry that reflects on the feelings of loss, uncomfortable silences, and the hidden stories buried in our everyday objects…poetry that cuts to the raw emotionality of familial life–the melancholia of emotionally austere families, fathers who seem too distant, and daughters who don’t see or talk to you as much as they should.”

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence is primarily funded through the generosity of Steven Fisher, ’70. Each year for more than a decade, a well-known poet, fiction writer, or nonfiction writer has visited campus for a week to work with students in the graduate creative writing program and undergraduate creative writing classes.

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.

Author photo: © Beowulf Sheehan

Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin will present their collaborative documentary project and book Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields on Monday, February 18, (rescheduled from earlier dates) as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The event will be held at 7:30 pm in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Kasdorf is author of three books in the Pitt Poetry Series, most recently Poetry in America. Her poems were awarded a 2009 NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize and appear in numerous anthologies. She is a Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, where she teaches creative writing. Rubin is a documentary photographer whose work addresses rural poverty, refugee migration, immigrant detention, and the social and environmental impacts of energy development. He has been a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in India, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow, and an Open Society Institute Media Fellow. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Penn State, where he teaches photography.

In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, “shale play” refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—transient industrial processes that often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, this project gathers evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play. Rosa Furneaux of Mother Jones magazine characterizes Shale Play as “a collage of voices, drawing in the testimonies of activists, residents, industry lawyers, and workers. Kasdorf explores the nuances and tensions of her home state without allowing any one perspective to dominate.” Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature puts the work in perspective this way: “The long sleep of the Appalachians has been dramatically interrupted by the sudden discovery of the Marcellus Shale. This book helps us see and understand what that has meant for the region. It’s a classic tale, with echoes of the region’s past—and deep implications for the planet’s future.”

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series events are free and open to the public. The series is a project of Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. It 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 the University Libraries.

Penn State Undergraduate Writers Take Note!

Several upcoming opportunities for FAME and FORTUNE at Penn State:

January 20, midnight: submit your writing and/or art to KALLIOPE, Penn State’s Undergraduate Literary Magazine. Details here: https://kalliope.psu.edu/submissions/.

January 28: submit to the English Department’s Undergraduate Writing Contests. Details here: http://english.la.psu.edu/undergraduate/awards.

Questions? Contact Alison Jaenicke, acj137@psu.edu

New York Times bestselling novelist Justin Torres will give a reading on Thursday, September 20, as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The event will be held at 7:30 pm in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Torres’ first novel We the Animals (2011) has won numerous awards, has been translated into fifteen languages, and has been adapted into a feature film, released in August, directed by Jeremiah Zager (see trailer below). National Public Radio called it a “brilliantly compressed novel…taut, elegant, lean,” noting that it is “told in a series of scenes that burst open like exploding stars, full of violence and light… a kind of ode to the bond of brotherhood.”

Torres has also published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at The New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012’s 5 Under 35. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series events are free and open to the public. The series is a project of Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. It 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 the University Libraries. Co-sponsorship for this reading is provided by the LGBTQA Student Resource Center and Latina/o Studies.

Novelist and Penn State alum Sunil Yapa will visit University Park on March 21-22. During his visit, Yapa will participate in two free public events: a discussion of his novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, to be held Wednesday, March 21, at 7:00 pm, at the HUB-Robeson Center’s Freeman Auditorium, and a reading at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 22, in the Nittany Lion Inn’s Alumni Lounge.

Sunil Yapa is a State College native who received his BA from Penn State and his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City in 2010, where he was a Hertog Fellow for Zadie Smith. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including, Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China, and India, as well as, London, Montreal, and New York City. He currently lives in Central Pennsylvania and teaches in low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.

Yapa’s debut novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2016) is set in Seattle, Washington, where in November of 1999, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest the World Trade Organization conference being held at the city’s convention center. The book was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and found its way onto many “best” lists, including Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year, Amazon Best Books of the Year, Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers, and Washington Post Notable Books. Of the novel, Ron Charles of The Washington Post writes: “A fantastic debut novel…. What is so enthralling about this novel is its syncopated riff of empathy as the perspective jumps around these participants—some peaceful, some violent, some determined, some incredulous…. Yapa creates a fluid sense of the riot as it washes over the city. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist ultimately does for WTO protests what Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night did for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, gathering that confrontation in competing visions of what happened and what it meant.”

The March 21 discussion is part of the slate of events for the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS)/Centre County Reads 2018 Community Read of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. (Information about additional events related to the Community Read can be found at http://cals.la.psu.edu/ and http://www.centrecountyreads.org/.)

The March 22 reading is part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series, a project of Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. It 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 the University Libraries. (For more information on the reading series, visit: https://creativewriting.psu.edu/.)

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Mary Gaitskill, this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence, will read from her work on Wednesday, February 21, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium at 7:30 pm. 

Gaitskill is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is the author of seven books of prose including Bad Behavior (1988), a collection of short stories dealing with a variety of taboo subjects; her most recent collection of personal essays written over the last two decades, Somebody with a Little Hammer (2017), covers topics from literature and politics to date-rape.

Gaitskill is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; she was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. She has taught at U-C Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown, and Syracuse University.

Of her most recent novel, The Mare (2015), New York Times journalist Parul Sehgal writes, “[Gaitskill]—known for depicting violent sex and lonely people—delves into the most frightening subject of all: real connection…What makes her exciting is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.” Alex Clark of The Guardian calls it “bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling,” noting that “The Mare explores inadequacy, optimism, craziness—and sets them in the context of love, and of need.”

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence is sponsored by Steven Fisher ’70, 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.

Author photo: © Derek Shapton