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.
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.
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.
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).
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 onSeptember 19 at 6:00pm in the Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.
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!
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!
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.
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.
Julia Kasdorf with WCoNA Founder and President PJ Piccirillo.
At its 2024 conference, held March 15-16 at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA, the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia (WCoNA) honored professor and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf with its annual Outstanding Contribution Award.
The purpose of the award is “to recognize an individual, ensemble, team or organization whose contributions or body of literary work have furthered the WCoNA mission to honor the region’s distinct literature, or, by extension, its people, and/or whose contributions enhance or have enhanced the craft of our authors, inspiring new work that represents northern Appalachia, the region of the Appalachia counties of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and the northern portion of West Virginia.”
At the conference’s closing ceremony, WCoNA Founder and President PJ Piccirillo read the following tribute to Kasdorf, written by WCoNA Board of Directors memberKimberly McElhatten, who nominated her for the award.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf‘s body of work and literary citizenship go beyond honoring the northern Appalachia canon. They advocate for it–its land, its animals, its plants, its people, its cultures, its diversity, and its stories to be heard.
In her early career, she focused on preserving and elevating Amish and Mennonite voices in the northern Appalachian canon. Kasdorf wrote the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (Cascadia, 2002). Yoder was the first to transcribe Amish hymns, which had only been preserved orally until then. He additionally wrote Rosanna of the Amish, claimed to be a true story of his mother’s life, in an effort to counter the false and negative literary representations of Amish culture depicted in Amish romances from the early 1900s until the 1930s—a work that has remained in print since 1940 and has sold over 500,000 copies.
At Messiah College, Kasdorf started the campus’ first literary series open to the public and doubled its budget. She also served as the faculty advisor for the campus literary magazine. At Penn State, she introduced the “The Writer in the Community” course and trained MFA students to teach in non-academic settings, such as long-term care facilities, community youth centers, jails, teen shelters, and beyond. This program continues as the non-profit Ridgelines Language Arts, founded and co-directed by one of her former MFA advisees, Abby Minor.
In her 24 years as a professor at Penn State, Kasdorf has directed the English Department’s MFA program and now the Creative Writing Program and has contributed to numerous community-facing literary projects, including the Public Poetry Project (formerly sponsored by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book), Centre County Reads, and the Favorite Poem Project of State College. She’s served on the editorial review team at Penn State Press. She is currently the faculty advisor of the Creative Writing Club at PSU.
In collaboration with graduate student Josh Brown, she published a new edition of Fred Lewis Pattee’s novel, The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains, set in late 19th century northern Appalachia, an effort that helps preserve Pattee’s legacy as the founder of American literary study, but also the post-Civil War cultural, social, and emotional landscape unique to northern Appalachia.
Additionally, Kasdorf contributes to communities and organizations beyond State College and PSU, including the popular reading series “Out Loud in Bellefonte.” She’s also served as a Public Humanities Council Commonwealth Speaker. In collaboration with community and university artists, she conceived and wrote lyrics for the musical performance and filmed oral histories about the invention of the folding and portable Ferris wheel in Centre Hall, PA, first performed as “aMUSEment: Play in the Workshop” and later as “Bright Toys of Summer: Garbrick Amusements from the Workshop to the Fair.”
Most recently, she helped coordinate a local history project to research and make visible the significant 19th and 20th-century Black history in Centre County. On this project, she mentored the writing of and produced a staged reading and musical performance of a play based on that research, “Finding Home: Adeline Lawson Graham, Colored Citizen of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.”
She’s a regular instructor at Chatham University’s Summer Community of Writers and regularly teaches at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center.
Most importantly, her mentorship extends beyond the classroom and public eye, offering emerging writers valuable mentorship, guidance, and support on their journey to successful publishing and academic careers, many of whom are also doing good, important work across northern Appalachia at our universities and colleges, elevating and diversifying our literary representation. Through these efforts, Julia Spicher Kasdorf has become an integral part of our region’s literary community and canon.
In addition to her legacy as an influential literary citizen of northern Appalachia, Kasdorf is a documentary poet who records and preserves our diverse stories with a keen eye on the impact of industry, war, and politics on our people.
Most notably, her book Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, along with her work in progress that will document agricultural resilience within thirty miles of her home in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, captures her commitment to our narratives. Her meticulous documentation does more than tell our stories; it enhances the craft of authors across northern Appalachia, influencing and inspiring the future of our literary canon.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf has emerged as a distinguished voice in American poetry, especially renowned for her vivid portrayal of the Ridge and Valley region of northern Appalachia. Kasdorf’s influence extends beyond her poetry; she is a pillar in the educational and artistic communities of northern Appalachia.
Her work and influence reach into our universities, communities, and beyond with twenty-one features on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and publications in esteemed magazines like Prairie Schooner, the Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. This broad recognition is a testament to her skill in capturing the essence of our region in her poetry.
–WCoNA Board of Directors memberKimberly McElhatten
WCoNA’s Outstanding Contribution Award comes with a donation of $300 in the name of the award winner, given to an organization or institution serving to broaden literacy within some part of northern Appalachia. Julia has selected Ridgelines Language Arts as the recipient of this year’s award funds. Ridgelines is a Bellefonte-based organization founded and co-directed by Abby Minor, a former student of Julia’s in Penn State’s MFA program in creative writing.
Ridgelines “provides expert language arts instruction to those who are underserved in the rural ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. We teach language arts—from poetry and storytelling to songwriting and journaling—in settings outside of academic institutions, including our area’s domestic violence shelter, low-income nursing home, youth detention center, state women’s prison, queer & trans youth groups, & more.”
Congratulations to Julia for this well-deserved recognition!
On March 22 and 23, Penn State Sustainability is offering several events featuring eco-poet, nonfiction nature writer, and professor Heather Swan. Swan will be joining Penn State for these events, open to all:
Keynote and Reading, Friday, March 22, at noon in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library (virtual attendance is possible — a registration link will be coming soon).
Nature Writing Workshop, Friday, March 22, at 4 p.m. in 201 Patterson Building, co-hosted with the Penn State Arboretum (space is limited) — register here
Heather Swan’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, Phoebe, Cold Mountain, The Raleigh Review, Basalt, About Place, Midwestern Gothic, The Hopper and anthologies such as Healing the Divide, New Poetry from the Midwest, and The Rewilding Anthology. Her chapbook, The Edge of Damage, was published by Parallel Press and won the Wisconsin Writers Chapbook Award, and her full collection, A Kinship with Ash, was published by Terrapin Books. Her nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Aeon, Catapult, The Learned Pig, Minding Nature, Edge Effects, Belt Magazine, and Resilience Journal and her book, Where Honeybees Thrive Stories from the Field, was published by Penn State Press. She teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Julianna Baggott Reading (photo credit: Dana Lynch)
During the week of January 22nd, Penn State welcomed best-selling author Julianna Baggott as the 2024 Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. Baggott has published over twenty books, some pseudonymously, including “Pure” and “Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders,” both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She heads the production company Mildred’s Moving Picture Show; her projects are in development at Disney+, Netflix, MGM, Paramount, Universal, and elsewhere. More information about her writing and productions can be found at her website. Alongside giving a free public reading to Penn State students, faculty, and local residents, Julianna Baggott met with students in advanced fiction workshops to offer advice and answer questions. As a student in the BA/MA program in creative writing, I had the opportunity and pleasure of meeting the author for a one-on-one manuscript review session, as well as in a graduate fiction workshop Q&A session. I knew instantly that I wanted to write about her because of how amazing this experience was. I hope that students and writers alike can find usefulness in her advice.
During a class visit with the ENGL 515 Graduate Fiction Workshop, Julianna revealed her journey to becoming a writer and her process when writing. She started her story with the past, talking about her interest in playwriting from a young age. She met her husband and business partner, David G.W. Scott, at her MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While in graduate school, she vowed to adhere to the great short story writer Andre Dubus’ advice. He said: “the short story is the great American form, but they’ll want you to write novels. Don’t cave to the publishers’ pressure.” When approached with the chance to write a novel, however, she ditched the advice and took the chance to diversify her writing. Although she didn’t have a novel ready for the agent, she quickly wrote thirty pages, hoping she could sign a deal and work on short fiction for a collection instead while she took her time with the novel. The agent was excited with the pages, and Baggott moved her entire focus onto writing the novel. This novel became national best-seller “Girl Talk,” which jump-started her career as a novelist at the age of 22. While raising four kids, now between the ages of 17 and 37, Julianna had to find time to focus on her craft. Being a mother took up lots of her time, but being able to move back to her hometown helped. While her mother and husband helped, she put aside two hours a day to write. She said it was a learning curve to learn how to balance life and work. She aimed to carve out two hours per day to work on her writing, just the right amount for her. “If you can work for two hours straight, that’s a real feat,” she said. “Two hours is perfect or it’ll be easy to burn out.”
Her Writing Process
Even after managing to carve out two hours a day to write, she realized what was missing was the “muse time.” It’s easy for your job and all other aspects of life to take over your brain if you let it, she warned. It needs to be an intention act to “reclaim muse time.” She emphasized the importance of staying away from your phone and other technology during this time. She said her ideas come to her all the time, and advised us to “write without writing.” This process is trying out story ideas and drafting in our heads, a practice she does constantly. She advised us, “[you] have to always be living a double life — a person in the practical world and an artist with a mind running underneath that world.” She said she never writes first drafts – only fifth or sixth drafts. During the Q&A, Julianna talked a lot about craft and her ties with screenwriting. As a professor in screenwriting, she often uses the opening from Aaron Sorkin’s movie “The Social Network” and asks students to track repeated words and phrases. She believes that repetition reveals a writer’s obsessiveness about certain topics and ideas. Repetition is a trait writers across genres should pay attention to. When beginning class, she says to her students – “Everything is parts.” Parts of a process, parts of a story. Collect these parts then put them together.
She was asked a question about horror writing: “What is horror writing now? How can we write horror that’s not schlocky?” She answered that she writes a lot of comedy and horror together – flip sides of each other. She noted that in countries with collective trauma (for example, war), the interest in horror goes up afterward. It has to do with power, control, agency, the ability to witness an atrocity and excavate it in a safe way (because the story is “fake”). There is catharsis in horror. She used Jordan Peele’s horror movies “Get Out” and “Us” as an example of this, movies which delve into discussions on race, guilt, and appropriation. When we step away from realism, it allows us to comment on society in different and sometimes more effective ways.
Her final words of advice to the class was to ask yourself: “What can I steal from my life to make art?” and “What are you spending your precious brain cells on?” She recommended, “Tag the world around you.” and “Look for negative space on your calendar and reclaim it, schedule your writing time.”
Final Thoughts
Audience of Baggott Reading (photo credit: Julia Kasdorf)
Julianna is an extremely friendly and understanding person, with a lot of passion behind her interests. She related student writings with pop culture references and inspirations. After reading my writing, she suggested HBOMax’s Westworld and 2016 British comedy-drama Fleabag. For her visit, I read her latest collection of short stories, “I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and Other Stories,” and highly enjoyed them (I recommend the audiobook for a quick and fun experience). I also read her short story published in the Cincinnati Review, “Cubby Safe.” I asked her about the inspiration for this story. She said that it was an idea she had for a long time ever since her eldest was in school. As gun violence got worse in America, she wanted to write a necessary commentary but couldn’t find the exact plot she wanted. It wasn’t until news programs started debating giving teachers guns that she found the plot and took off writing.
During the Q&A, she emphasized her enjoyment of memory exercises, and recommended finding words and writing about them. She reiterated Oliver Windle Holmes’s quote, “Memory is a net.” Put your net into the ocean to pull up what you can. Your net edits out the boring stuff and leaves the dynamic and resonant material from your childhood. As an exercise, the words she gave were: Fire. Boss. Sky. Tree. She recommended only one word at a time and to write as much as you can about the word, whether that be a memory or a thought you have about it.
For further inpsiration, check out Julianna Baggott’s six-week audio series called Efficient Creativity. In this audio series, she talks about the creative process of writing. This ranges from what to do when you first have an idea, what to do with writer’s block, how to build a world, and more! Her first week is offered free on SoundCloud.
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Dana Lynch is the current Creative Writing Program Intern and is a first-year BA/MA student concentrating in Creative Nonfiction. She works at the Pattee and Paterno Library to pay for her book addiction. She is an avid writer of both nonfiction and fiction, focusing on her bi-racial Korean identity. She hopes to escape the desk job lifestyle and write for a living.
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