UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Essayist, poet and Penn State alumna Christine Hume will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.
Hume’s most recent essay collection, “Everything I Never Wanted to Know” (Ohio State University Press, 2023), confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the United States. The collection geographically focuses on Ypsilanti, Michigan, which has the third largest number of registered sexual offenders in the country and the fourth largest per capita. Kirkus Review calls it a “thoughtfully disturbing, sharp sociological study,” and Publishers Weekly describes it as a “dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.”
Hume was born to a military family and lived in more than 25 places in the United States and Europe before settling in Ypsilanti, where she has taught in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University since 2001. After earning a bachelor of arts degree from Penn State in 1990, she earned a master of fine arts from Columbia University in 1993 and a doctorate from the University of Denver in 2000. Soon after she published three books of poetry — “Musca Domestica,” “Alaskaphrenia,” and “Shot” — her writing evolved into prose forms, especially documentary, experimental and lyric approaches to the essay.
The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives generous 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 Penn State University Libraries. A full list of readings in the 2023-24 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.