UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Acclaimed author and memoirist Ariel Levy will give a free public reading of her work as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 8, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Levy is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the New York Times-bestselling memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply” (2017). She was guest editor of the anthology, “The Best American Essays of 2015,” and author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” (2005).

Since joining The New Yorker staff in 2008, subjects for her articles have included South African runner Caster Semenya; artist Catherine Opie; swimmer Diana Nyad; and Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act. Levy won a National Magazine Award in 2013 for her essay, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.”

“The Rules Do Not Apply” has been named one of the best books of the year by Vogue, Time, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Library Journal, and NPR. Critics praised Levy’s ability to “see herself with fierce, unforgiving clarity,” and call her approach in the book “as unsparing and bleakly hilarious as it’s possible to be about oneself.”

The Mary E. Rolling Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English that receives generous support from the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts; the Department of English; the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment; the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing; and, University Libraries.  Co-sponsorship for Levy’s reading is provided by the Penn State Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the LGBTQA Student Resource Center.

A full list of readings in the 2018-2019 series can be found at https://creativewriting.psu.edu/.