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Past English Events

Toby Thompson is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Fired On: Targeting Western American Art, published in March 2020 by Bangtail Press....
1/28/2021 7:30pm
Virtual Event

Climate change is a critical scientific and social issue, and nowhere are the consequences of a warming climate more pronounced and observable than in the...
2/23/2021 5pm
Virtual Event

Join a panel discussion with Professor Hester Blum, the documentary's Emmy award-winning producer/director Dave Clark, and other expedition participants...
2/23/2021 6pm
Virtual Event

Cary Holladay’s publications include eight volumes of fiction, most recently Brides in the Sky: Stories and a Novella (Swallow/Ohio University Press 2019),...
3/25/2021 7:30pm
Virtual Event

Panel discussion moderated by Penn State alumnus Jason Cherkis '95 English, journalist
4/6/2021 3pm
Virtual Event

Tim Seibles is the author of six collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), and...
4/7/2021 7:30pm

The Chronicle Review introduced their recent via via Zoom Zoom collection “Endgame: Can literary studies survive?” with the bold statement, “The...
4/16/2021 12pm
Virtual Event

James Charlesworth’s first novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, was published in 2019. He is a frequent contributor of music-related essays for...
9/9/2021 7:30pm

Alicia Ostriker has published seventeen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After; Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The...
9/23/2021 7:30pm
Virtual Event

Alissa Nutting is the author of the story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, as well as the novels Tampa and Made for Love. A television series...
10/14/2021 7:30pm
Virtual Event

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s The Memory Eaters was named among “great books from small presses to read now” by Buzzfeed during the COVID pandemic, and was featured...
11/4/2021 7pm
Foster Auditorium
Stream Available

Emily Grosholz teaches philosophy at Penn State and has been an advisory editor for The Hudson Review since 1984. She has published eight books of poetry....
1/30/2020 7:30pm

Chet’la Sebree is the author of Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize. Sebree is an assistant professor and...
2/13/2020 7:30pm

Chet’la Sebree is the author of Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize. Sebree is an assistant professor and...
2/13/2020 7:30pm

Join us online or at local events to help transcribe, read, and teach the papers of Anna Julia Cooper, a visionary Black feminist. Her work influenced...
2/14/2020 12pm

Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour (2017), appeared on numerous “best books of the year” lists, and her seventh novel, Someone (2013) was a New...
4/16/2020 7:30pm

The College of the Liberal Arts is hosting a lecture series featuring several faculty members discussing different dimensions of the COVID-19...
5/26/2020 3pm

The College of the Liberal Arts is hosting a lecture series featuring several faculty members discussing different dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The...
5/28/2020 3pm

The College of the Liberal Arts is hosting a lecture series featuring several faculty members discussing different dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The...
6/2/2020 3pm

Voices of Power in Women’s Activism This year’s Marathon Read will celebrate the work of female writers and activists to expand political, social, and...
10/22/2020 10am
Virtual Event

Digital technologies are nearly ubiquitous and serve a great many purposes, but this very heterogeneity discourages an analysis of universal characteristics...
3/14/2019 3:30pm

New psychiatric research leashes mobile device data to neuroscientific and genetic research for the purpose of resolving weaknesses in psychiatric...
3/28/2019 3:30pm

An Earth Day talk by Dorion Sagan. Sagan is a prolific science and fiction writer, author of some twenty books, including the recent Cosmic Apprentice:...
4/22/2019 4pm

Terrance Hayes is the author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; To Float In The...
9/12/2019 7:30pm

Vicki Glembocki is an award-winning magazine writer, author of the memoir The Second Nine Months, and a contributing editor at Readers Digest. Her work has...
10/10/2019 7:30pm

Callan Wink works as a fly fishing guide in Livingston, MT. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men's Journal, The Best American...
11/7/2019 7:30pm

Todd Davis is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, most recently Native Species (2019) and Winterkill (2016), both published by Michigan...
11/14/2019 7:30pm

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the award-winning author of five books of poetry: Madwoman, The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This...
1/25/2018 7:30pm

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,...
2/21/2018 7:30pm

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...
3/22/2018 7:30pm

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...
4/3/2018 7:30pm

Lecture sponsored by the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Department of English This talk comes from my book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the...
4/5/2018 3:30pm

Co-sponsors are the departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the LGBTQA Student Resource Center funded by...
4/5/2018 5pm

Many current discussions of human rights dispute whether their justification is moral or political. Neither position is satisfactory. If human rights have no...
4/27/2018 3:30pm

A meeting designed for undergraduates enrolled in Rhetoric and Civic Life who would like to learn more about majoring in English.
2/8/2017 11am

Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Good on Paper (Melville House 2016) and A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her stories...
2/16/2017 7:30pm

CALS will sponsor the roundtable “Rethinking the American West” in the Mann Assembly Room, Pattee-Paterno Library. Three invited panelists will discuss how...
3/14/2017 4pm

Lecture sponsored by the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Department of English Andrew Kopec, Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne This...
3/17/2017 3:30pm

CALS will host “Radical Engagements: Speculative Fictions and Social Justice,” the 6th Annual CALS Spring Symposium, in Foster Auditorium, Pattee-Paterno...
3/20/2017 10am

Sarah Manguso is the author of four books of prose including Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship...
3/22/2017 7:30pm

Lecture sponsored by the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Department of English Pooja Rangan, Amherst College What can autism teach us about the...
3/31/2017 4pm

CALS will sponsor the roundtable “Rethinking the American West” in the Mann Assembly Room, Pattee-Paterno Library. Three invited panelists will discuss how...
4/3/2017 4pm

Lecture sponsored by the Digital Culture and Media Initiative, Department of English Margaret Schwartz, Fordham University What happens when we view care...
4/14/2017 3:30pm

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...
9/7/2017 7:30pm

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...
9/14/2017 7:30pm

"From Metagames to Moneygames" Metagames, simply put, are games about games. They are the games we play in, on, around, and through videogames. And although...
10/12/2017 1:45pm

U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015) and three books of poetry. Her collection...
10/19/2017 7:30pm

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies, winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry (University of Tampa Press, 2017) and the chapbook...
10/27/2017 4pm

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,...
11/14/2017 7:30pm

Charlotte Holmes is the author of The Grass Labyrinth and Gifts adn Other Stories. A long-time teacher of creative writing at Penn State, she has received...
1/21/2016 7:30pm

Paola Corso, poet, essayist, and author of The Laundress Catches Her Breath and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing.
2/3/2016 12:10pm

Drawing upon first-hand accounts, diaries, and letters, Karen Abbott’s Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy re-writes the stories of four incredible, real-life...
3/1/2016 3:30pm

Kate Daniels is the author of four collections of poetry, including A Walk in Victoria's Secret (LSU 2011), her most recent. She is Professor of English and...
3/24/2016 7:30pm

Abstract: In our rejoinders to the advance of technology, we often assume that ours is an unprecedented historical conjuncture. This talk, however, will...
3/31/2016 3:30pm

Presentation description: Taking up certain aspects of my 2014 article "The Perils of the Digital Humanities," this talk will address the complex...
4/21/2016 2pm

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to five other novels, including One Foot in...
9/26/2016 7:30pm

Many humanities disciplines are finally taking critical games studies seriously at the same time that the gaming industrial complex (GIC), as I call it,...
10/6/2016 3:30pm

An opportunity for English majors to learn about applying for graduate study in English.
10/10/2016 3:30pm

Photo Credit: Josh Clark as Proteus and Ross Neal as Valentine in THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. Photo by Michael Bailey.
10/16/2016 2pm

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2017) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served...
10/19/2016 7:30pm

Join us for the next in our series of conferences, Celebrating African American Literature and Language, which will focus on the long tradition of "Race and...
10/28/2016

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Third Voice, (Tupelo Press, 2017), Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014), Goodbye...
11/3/2016 7:30pm

Elizabeth Benedict is a graduate of Barnard College and the author of five novels, including the bestseller Almost and the National Book Award finalist Slow...
9/24/2015 7:30pm

Vijay Seshadri is the author of three collections of poetry, including 3 Sections, which was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer Prize...
10/29/2015 7:30pm

On Tuesday, November 3, the American Shakespeare Center On Tour will present a free performance of William Shakespeare's The Life of King Henry the Fifth to...
11/3/2015 7pm

American Shakespeare Center on tour will perform Henry V. Details for the performance will be posted as they become available.
11/4/2015

Merrill Gilfillan is the award-winning author of two short story collections, many books of poems, and five essay collections. Much of his work addresses...
11/12/2015 7:30pm

Julie Johnson will be launching her new book about iron furnaces and industrialization in PA, Jumping the Pit.
11/18/2015 7pm