UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Critically acclaimed and bestselling author/screenwriter Julianna Baggott will visit Penn State Jan. 22-25 as this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence. Baggott will give a free public reading as part of her visit at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.
The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence program brings a well-known poet, fiction writer or nonfiction writer to campus each year to share their expertise and work with students in undergraduate creative writing classes and the graduate creative writing Program. It is funded primarily through the generosity of Steven Fisher, a 1970 Penn State graduate in English, with additional support from the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English and the College of the Liberal Arts.
Baggott is a prolific writer whose work spans multiple genres and reaches a wide array of audiences. She has published more than 20 books — under her own name and pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode — mostly for adult audiences, but some for younger readers as well. Her novels “Pure” (2014) and “Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders” (2015) were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her two most recent books, “The Wick” and “I’d Really Prefer Not to be Here with You,” were released in 2023.
Baggott has also published four collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in such places as The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times “Modern Love” column, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review and Best American Poetry. Her work has also been read on NPR’s Here and Now, Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered. Baggott’s essays, stories and poems are highly anthologized, and more than 100 foreign editions of her novels have been published or are forthcoming.
Baggott’s writing has been optioned by Fox2000, Nickelodeon/Paramount, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Disney+, to name a few. Table readings of her work have been performed by Kate Winslet, Bradley Cooper, Greta Gerwig, Bill Hader, Paul Dano and Adam Driver. The novel “Which Brings Me To You” (co-written with Steve Almond, a Kirkus Reviews "Best Book of 2006") is currently in development with BCDF Films, with Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff to star.
Baggott teaches screenwriting at Florida State University, where she is an associate professor in the College of Motion Picture Arts. She also held the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross from 2014 to 2016.
Baggott and her husband and business partner, David Scott, have four children. She frequently works on story development with her son Finneas Scott, a Brooklyn-based writer; their most notable recent project is “Backwards,” currently in development with Netflix. In conjunction with Finneas and her editor Brendan Deneen, Baggott recently launched the film and television production company Mildred’s Moving Picture Show, named after her “indomitable and glamorous grandmother.”