READING SERIES, 2017-18 Fall 2017
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PENN STATE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM READING SERIES, 2017-18 (Mary E. Rolling Readers + Dickinson Lecturer + Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence) Fall 2017 LYRAE VAN CLIEF-STEFANON: Thursday, September 7, 7:30 pm, Foster Auditorium (Rolling) Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook in collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Shenandoah. She is currently at work on a third collection, The Coal Tar Colors. Van Clief- Stefanon earned her MFA at Penn State and is currently associate professor of English at Cornell University. CHRIS BACHELDER: Thursday, September 14, 7:30 pm, 113 Carnegie Building (Rolling) Chris Bachelder’s fourth novel, The Throwback Special, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award in fiction. He was awarded the Terry Southern Prize for humor from The Paris Review, as well as an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bachelder, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati, is also the author of the novels Bear v. Shark, U.S.!, and Abbott Awaits. (Co-sponsorship for this reading is provided by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism and The Paterno Family Professorship.) TRACY K. SMITH: Thursday, October 19, 7:30 pm, Assembly Room, Nittany Lion Inn (Dickinson Lecturer) Tracy K. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015) and three books of poetry. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Duende won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. In 2014 the Academy of American Poets awarded Smith with the Academy Fellowship, awarded to one poet each year to recognize distinguished poetic achievement. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. SUKI KIM: Tuesday, November 14, 7:30 pm, Foster Auditorium (Rolling) Suki Kim is the only writer ever to go live undercover in North Korea. Her New York Times bestselling book of investigative literary nonfiction, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korean Elite documents the final year of Kim Jong-il regime and the psychology of its future leadership. An investigative journalist and a novelist, Kim’s first novel, The Interpreter, was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize, and she is a contributing editor at The New Republic. (Co-sponsorship for this reading is provided by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.) JENNIFER HAIGH: Friday, December 1, 7:30 pm, Foster Auditorium (Rolling) Jennifer Haigh’s novel HEAT AND LIGHT was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Slate Magazine, and has received a 2017 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her previous books -- News from Heaven, Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble -- have won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in fiction, and have been published in sixteen languages. Haigh’s short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories and many other places. A native of Cambria County, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now lives in Boston. (Co-sponsorship for this reading is provided by the Weiss Chair of the Humanities.) Spring 2018 SHARA MCCALLUM: Thursday, January 25, 7:30 pm, Foster Auditorium (Rolling) Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK: Madwoman, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, UK, and other parts of Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel, and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. Her personal essays appear regularly in print and online. Recognition for her writing includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry, and other awards. For over ten years she was the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University and now teaches creative writing and literature at Penn State University. MARY GAITSKILL: Wednesday, February 21, 7:30 pm, Foster Auditorium (Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence) Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica, and The Mare. She has also written three story collections: Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. A collection of her essays, Somebody with A Little Hammer, was published in April 2017. She has taught writing and literature on the graduate and undergraduate level since 1993; she is now teaching at Claremont McKenna College in California. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and a Cullman Research Fellowship in 2010. SUNIL YAPA: Thursday, March 22, 7:30 pm, Alumni Lounge, Nittany Lion Inn (Rolling) Sunil Yapa’s first novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2016) 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 American Booksellers January 2016 Indie Next Great Reads. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including The Netherlands, Thailand, Greece, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, China, and India, as well as London, Montreal, and New York City. His writing has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, The Margins, Hyphen Magazine, The Tottenville Review, Pindeldyboz: Stories that Defy Classification, and others. Sunil Yapa holds a BA in economic geography from Penn State University, and received his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City. JILLIAN CANTOR: Tuesday, April 3, 7:30 pm, Foster Auditorium (Rolling) Jillian Cantor earned a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is the author of award-winning novels for teens and adults, including, most recently, the critically acclaimed The Lost Letter and Margot, which was a Library Reads pick. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Cantor currently lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons. .