UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Memoirist and fiction writer Grace Talusan will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at Penn State.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 24 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. The in-person event also will be available via livestream; those interested in attending virtually must register in advance.
Born in the Philippines and raised in the United States, Talusan is the author of the memoir, “The Body Papers” — a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, the winner in nonfiction for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her short story, "The Book of Life and Death," was chosen for the 2020 Boston Book Festival's One City One Story program and was translated into several languages, including Tagalog. She has published essays in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Award in Prose. Currently, Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She lives outside of Boston with her husband, photographer Alonso Nichols.
Kirkus Reviews characterizes Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir “The Body Papers” this way: “A Filipino-American writer's debut memoir about how she overcame a personal history fraught with racism, sexual trauma, mental illness, and cancer. ... Moving and eloquent, Talusan's book is a testament not only to one woman's fierce will to live, but also to the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.” Novelist Celeste Ng notes that “Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us,” calling the book “a stunning work by a powerful new writer who — like the best memoirists — transcends the personal to speak on a universal level.”
The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives support from the 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. A full list of readings in the 2021-22 series, as well as links for livestreams and virtual readings, can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.