Select pieces from U.S. Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera’s, reading from the Emily Dickinson Lecture are officially up on the Creative Writing YouTube channel! Be sure to check them out if you couldn’t be with us this past October 19th!

A special thank you also goes to BA/MA student, Abby Kennedy, on conducting an incredibly compelling interview with Mr. Herrera, which can also be found in several videos on our YouTube channel.

For a complete list of past recorded readings and interviews, please check out our channel as well as the Videos tab!

Join us Thursday, Nov. 3 at 7:30 p.m. as award-winning poet, Ruth Ellen Kocher, a Penn State alumna who earned a bachelor of arts in English in 1990, will read as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Kocher is the author of seven books of poetry, including “Desdemona’s Fire,” winner of the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets; “When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering,” winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry; and, “domina Un/blued,” winner of the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award. Her work has also been published in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ploughshares, African American Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Washington Square, Crab Orchard Review, and Ninth Letter.  Her poems have also been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r.

About Kocher’s most recent collection, “Third Voice,” Publisher’s Weekly writes, “The dramatic voices that operate throughout act as a reminder that history is a fragmented reality with many angles, not simply a linear series of indisputable facts.” Poet Al Young also praises Kocher, saying, “This versatile poet blinks at nothing under the stars. Speaking and singing in the many voices and key signatures of poetry, our primal human language, Kocher shines and sheds visible and audible light.”

Kocher currently lives in Erie, Colorado, and teaches in the Poetry, Poetics, and Literature Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Join us Wednesday, October 19^th at 7:30 p.m. to hear United States Poet Laureate, PEN/Beyond Margins Award winner, and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Juan Felipe Herrera deliver this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecture in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Herrera, who has also served as California’s Poet Laureate, is the first Latino to hold the U.S. Poet Laureate position. He is the author of numerous collections of poems and has also written short stories, young adult novels, and books of prose for children – including “Half the World in Light,” which was adapted into a musical in New York City. Herrera has received the Americas Award from the Consortium of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for his young adult novel, “Crashboomlove;” and, the New Writer Award from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation for his novel, “Calling the Doves.”

As the current Poet Laureate, Herrera is working on a project titled “La Casa de Colores,” which features his own pieces but seeks contributions from members of the community as well.  When he is not writing, Herrera is a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth. He currently lives in California and serves on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

Although Herrera deals with heavy social and political topics in much of his work, NPR’s Craig Morgan Teicher describes Herrera and his poetry in a more positive light: “His wide-eyed amazement fortifies him with a joyful naiveté with which he meets the world, happy to encounter it again and again.”  Similarly, the New York Times’ Dwight Garner admires the way Herrera’s “senses are open toward the world and his bearing on the page is noble and entrancingly weird.”

Stephen Burt of the New York Times praises Herrera, saying: “Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”

A recently published article from Penn State News details the collaborative 400-level course taught last spring by writer, Julia Kasdorf, and photographer, Steven Rubin. The special-topics course combined both documentary writing and photography to develop a creative glimpse into life in Renovo, PA.

The results of this eye-opening course was the student creation of three books and three websites all encompassing different elements of the small, northern-Pennsylvania town.

Check out some the students’ work here:

“Revealing Renovo” website by Kate Wright (BA/MA 2017), Ian Whitehead-Scanlon, and Morgan Clark

Website detailing Renovo’s history by Kristin Consorti, Susan Moskal, and Val Smith

This website focusing on the Bucktail Medical Center, created by Scarlett Li and Jane Jin

Congratulations to all those involved and to the students whose books were presented to the Renovo Area Public Library at the conclusion of the course!

This past Friday, BA/MA students and faculty gathered together for the first potluck of the year with great food and even better company. Sitting outside enjoying the beautiful weather, first years, second years, and professors alike caught up on their summers and the beginning of their semesters with, of course, a few breaks in between to jump on the trampoline. Thank you to everyone who came out for the delicious food and a special thank you to Julia Kasdorf for hosting! We all can’t wait until the next event!

Join us this upcoming Monday, September 26^th, as bestselling novelist, short story writer, and poet, Ron Rash, opens this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 7:30 pm in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena as well as One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight, Above the Waterfall, and The Risen, released on September 6^th. In addition to novels, Rash has also published five collections of poems and six collections of stories. Two of his short story collections have won awards as well: Burning Bright received the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and Chemistry and Other Stories was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award.  Rash is also a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize and winner of the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Publisher’s Weekly offers the following praise for Rash’s most recent novel, The Risen: “Beyond the propulsion of Rash’s thrilled whodunit plot is his characteristically excellent prose.”  Dannye Powell at The Charlotte Observer proclaims, “The Risen is an important novel – and an intriguing one – from one of our master storytellers. In its pages, the past rises up, haunting and chiding, demanding answers of us all.” The Philadelphia Inquirer has hailed him as “our Appalachian Shakespeare.”

In an interview for the South Carolina Review, Rash stated, “I don’t like living in cities.” His novels, short stories, and poetry, therefore, often have a focus on the lives of people in rural, southern settings.

Currently living in North Carolina with his family, Rash also teaches at Western Carolina University where he serves as the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies.

Tonight our reading series will come to a close with a final reading by Tom Williams. Williams is the author of The Mimic’s Own Voice, Don’t Start Me Talkin’, and Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales, which was released in July of last year. An associate editor of the American Book Review, Williams also chairs the English Department at Morehead State University in Kentucky.

Join us tonight for a reading by Aryn Kyle, an award-winning novelist and short fiction writer. Kyle is the author of The God of Animals, an international best-selling novel. Her latest work, Boys and Girls Like You and Me, is a short story collection consisting of eleven stories, most of which center around female protagonists. Kyle is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award as well as a National Magazine Award in fiction.

Our very own Charlotte Holmes will be kicking off our Mary E. Rolling Series this semester tonight at 7:30 in Foster Auditorium. She will be reading from her brand new book of short stories, The Grass Labyrinth. Holmes is the director of the Creative Writing Program here at Penn State, as well as a professor of Women’s Studies and Creative Writing. She has won several awards for teaching, including the George Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. The Grass Labyrinth is her second collection of short stories, in addition to Gifts and Other Stories.

The Mary E. Rolling series finished up the semester with a reading from Merrill Gillfillan, author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He read first from what he described as the “sometimes-slippery realm of non-fiction,” explaining “much fiction can be elbowed into non-fiction, and much non-fiction is elbowed into fiction… they are two prongs from the same root.” His first example of this genre was his story The Musselshell & South, which is set in Northern Montana. He then moved east towards the Appalachians with Burn House to Paw Paw.  His next reading he described as his “native Ohio,” a piece called The Warbler Road, followed by the poems, The Serpent and Spanish for Vanish.