Mary E. Rolling Reading Series Presents Sherrie Flick on October 10

Author Photo of Sherrie FlickNationally renowned fiction writer Sherrie Flick 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, October 10, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Sherrie Flick
 is the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College and a senior lecturer at Chatham University. Recent awards include a 2023 Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Her debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist is part of the American Lives series at University of Nebraska Press. One of the essays in Homing, “All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,” originally published in New England Review, was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. Flick is the author of Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short StoriesWhiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel. She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 (with guest editor Aimee Bender), and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She writes, works, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Please see the poster below for more information about the event:

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Meet the Students in our Graduate Degree Program of Creative Writing

Penn State’s integrated undergraduate/graduate program in creative writing welcomes ten new students this fall 2024 to join the nine continuing into their second year of the program. Though some members of the cohort come from places such as Long Island, south Florida, and Mexico, most call Pennsylvania home. Drawing from the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien, John Steinbeck, Mary Oliver, and J.D. Salinger, these students are inspired to write by fantasy, the natural world, and their own experiences. Outside of the world of the pen, these writers spend their free time wandering art museums, playing in bands, and working in ceramic studios. Check out the profiles of our first and second-year students on the (“Student Bios” page)!

Mary E. Rolling Reading Series Presents Jai Chakrabarti

Nationally renowned fiction writer Jai Chakrabarti 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, September 19, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ’21), which was awareded the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. The novel was also recognized as the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, a finalist for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Chakrabarti is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf), which was among The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. His short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space.

Chakrabarti’s nonfiction has been widely published in journals such as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Chakrabarti is also a trained computer scientist.

Born in Kolkata, India, he currently lives in New York with his family and is a faculty member at Bennington Writing Seminars.

Castles in the Sky: Screening, Poetry Reading, and Conversation

The Department of English is co-sponsoring a film screening of Castles in the Sky (a 30-minute short film) directed by Pearl Gluck, Penn State Associate Professor of Film Production, on September 5 from 3:30-5:00pm.

The film depicts Malke, a Holocaust survivor and beloved sex-ed teacher living in a cloistered Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Malke has a secret life slamming poetry in New York’s Lower East Side, defying all communal norms and laws until her transgressive pursuits are discovered by one of her bridal students. Is Malke willing to risk it all for her poetry?

Creative Writing director Julia Spicher Kasdorf makes a brief cameo appearance in the film, reciting a poem she performed in the Nuyorican Poets Café back in the 1990s. Following the film screening, Kasdorf will take part in a conversation about cross-cultural conversations and art-making with the film’s director Professor Pearl Gluck, along with and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, a poet, writer, and translator who grew up in the Hasidic community, moderated by Penn State Sparks Professor of English Shara McCallum.

Please see the attached poster for more details about the event.

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Professor Elizabeth Kadetsky Awarded Prestigious National Grant

Penn State Creative Writing Professor Elizabeth Kadetsky received a Public Scholars fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to work for one year to complete her book about the stolen matrika sculptures and the culture of exploitation that contributed to their theft in southwest Rajasthan in 1962.

The NEH Public Scholars grants support popular nonfiction books in the humanities and will enable publication of 25 new titles this year, including Professor Kadetsky’s book. Find out more about the Public Scholars grant and the other supported projects here.

Professor Kadetsky also recently published the powerful new personal narrative essay “We Are Here Now” featured in the Colorado Review.

Congratulations, Professor Kadetsky!

Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé Publishes Critically Acclaimed Debut Novel

Penn State Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé published his critically acclaimed debut novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, in July of 2024. It is a searing exploration of the global migration crisis that moves from Nigeria to Libya to Italy.

The Kirkus Review says the novel “opens like a thriller” and continues as a “bracing, well-paced story of migrant desperation.” Okey Ndibe calls it “groundbreaking” and that it “brings a stalwart heart to the prospect of a fresh beginning.”

Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania hosted the book launch, where Kọ́láwọlé had an engaging conversation with Messiah University Professor, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, preceding an audience Q&A. Kọ́láwọlé discussed his inspiration and process for writing the book, including how he chose character names like Able God and Ben Ten. He spoke about wanting to portray real, vivid, complex characters who have various reasons for making the dangerous Trans-Saharan migrant route from their homes.

Kọ́láwọlé recently wrote in The Guardian about Africa’s migration crisis and the need to publish more books about it. He stresses that, “Literature has the power to change the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. This is my way of imploring you not to look away – to see migrants in all of their humanity. It’s me shouting from the rooftops that African lives matter.”

Professor Samuel Kọ́láwọlé will have a book celebration event at Webster’s Bookstore in State College, Pennsylvania on September 27 at 6:00pm. He will also have a reading and book signing at Penn State on January 30 as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. To find out more about Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, The Road to the Salt Sea, and his book tour, visit his website.

Congratulations, Professor Kọ́láwọlé!

 

2024-25 Creative Writing Reading Series Announced

audience members clapping
Credit: Jackson Ranger, Daily Collegian

We’re excited to announce next year’s line-up for our creative writing reading series, which includes the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series, the Emily Dickinson Lectureship in Creative Writing, and the Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. As always, the series includes a mix of poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers (and some who tackle more than one genre).  

You can find the names and dates here! 

The writers include Penn State faculty (Samuel Kọ́láwọlé whose novel comes out this July), alumni (Jami Nakamura Lin), and other nationally and internationally recognized writers, including Jai Chakrabarti, who will kick off our first reading on September 19 at 6:00pm in the Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium. 

Maggie Dressler Wins 2024 AWP Intro Journals Award

Maggie Dressler, a recent graduate of the BAMA program, was selected as a winner of the 2024 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Journals Project for her essay “My Identity is Disputed Territory,” about growing up in Ramallah, in the West Bank, with parents who were Christian aid workers from the US.

The AWP Intro Journal Project is a literary competition for the discovery and publication of the best new works by students currently enrolled in AWP member programs. Program directors nominate student work from all genres, and winners are selected for publication in participating literary journals.

Maggie’s essay will be published by Reed Magazine in an upcoming issue. Congratulations, Maggie!

Congratulations to 2024 BA/MA Graduates!

On Friday, April 19, 2024, the Penn State creative writing community gathered to listen to excerpts from the final projects by nine BA/MA students who will graduate with their MA in creative writing this spring.

Pictured below are the BA/MA Class of 2024 (L to R): back row–Nikolai Korbich, Ava Wendelken, Emmanuela Eneh, Aliyah Rios, Barbara Kutz, Margaret Dressler; front row–Kiera Sargent, Cynthia Rodi, Eliza Nicewonger.

Congrats to the graduates!

9 graduating BAMA students posing

 

In addition to celebrating the graduating BA/MA class with family, faculty, and friends, we also welcomed the 10 incoming members of the BA/MA class of 2026, said farewell to Alison Jaenicke, who has served as Assistant Director of Creative Writing for the past 11 years, and welcomed the new Assistant Director of CW, Ellen Skirvin.

BAMA Student Aliyah Rios reads to a full house.

 

Rolling Reading Series 4/11: CHRISTINE HUME, Essayist, Poet, Penn State Alum

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Essayist, poet, and Penn State grad Christine Hume 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 11, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. 

Christine Hume’s most recent essay collection, “Everything I Never Wanted to Know” (Ohio State University Press, 2023), confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the United States. Kirkus Review calls it a “thoughtfully disturbing, sharp sociological study,” and Publishers Weekly describes it as a “dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” The New York Times calls her previous book “Saturation Project,” a lyric portrait of girlhood, “a richly, meditative lyric memoir…that arrives with the force of a hurricane.”  

Hume was born to a military family and lived in more than 25 places in the U.S. and Europe before settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her recent essay collection geographically focuses on Ypsilanti, which has the third largest number of registered sexual offenders in the country and the fourth largest per capita. Since 2001 she has taught in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 1993 and a PhD from University of Denver in 2000. Soon after she published three books of poetry – “Musca Domestica,” “Alaskaphrenia,” and “Shot”–her writing evolved into prose forms, especially documentary, experimental, and lyric approaches to the essay.  

For more on Hume, visit her website: https://christinehume.com/