UNIVERSITY PARK, PA — Award-winning author Matthew Salesses 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. on Thursday, Feb. 22, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on Penn State's University Park campus.
Salesses is a novelist, scholar and Korean adoptee who has written and spoken widely about adoption, race and parenting. The current assistant professor of writing at Columbia University was named one of 32 Essential Asian-American Writers by Buzzfeed in 2015.
Salesses has written eight books, including his most recent novel, “The Sense of Wonder” (2023), which was featured on The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 and several other “best of” lists. Ron Charles of The Washington Post characterizes the novel this way: “What Salesses does here is a remarkable feat of artistic prowess that somehow blends the themes of K-drama with the spectacle of sports drama in a way that resets our frame of reference for the Korean American experience. Indeed, it’s a move that doesn’t seem entirely possible until you see the jump yourself.”
Salesses also is the author of “Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping” (2021), which challenges those teaching creative writing to look at traditional writing workshop practices with a fresh eye and an antiracist lens. Salesses will share insights from that book as part of a panel discussion for Penn State literature and writing faculty members on Wednesday, Feb. 21.
Salesses’ 2020 novel, “Disappear Doppleganger Disappear,” was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. He is currently working on a memoir titled “To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.”
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 Penn State University Libraries. A full list of readings in the 2023-24 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.