Penn State Creative Writing Program to host reading by Kanza Javed

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Accomplished fiction writer Kanza Javed will offer a reading and Q&A at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 9, in 102 Burrowes Building (Grucci Room) on the Penn State University Park campus.

Javed received her master of philosophy degree from Kinnaird College for Women and her master of fine arts degree in fiction from West Virginia University, where she received the Rebecca Mason Perry Prize. She is the winner of the Reynolds Price Prize for Fiction and has been a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Award, the Salamander Short Fiction Contest, and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her debut novel, “Ashes, Wine and Dust,” was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. Her most recent collection of short stories, “What Remains After a Fire,” was published by W.W. Norton in September of 2025.

Javed’s short fiction has appeared in American Literary Review, the Punch Magazine, Salamander, Greensboro Review, Narrating Pakistan and the Malahat Review. Her work was most recently featured in Oxford University Press' “In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature,” edited by Muneeza Shamsie.

More events hosted by the Penn State Creative Writing Program in English can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.