UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Acclaimed author Sarah Manguso, this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence, will offer a free public reading of her work at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 22, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.
Manguso is the author of five books of prose, including: “Ongoingness,” a meditation on motherhood and time; “The Guardians,” an investigation of friendship and suicide; “The Two Kinds of Decay,” a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease; “Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape,” a collection of very short stories; and “300 Arguments,” a book of essays released in February 2017. She has also penned two poetry collections, poems from which have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. Manguso’s work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications.
Tess Taylor from NPR had this to say about “300 Arguments”: “This collection transcends any category to be something totally its own. … Manguso [has] captured the argumentative voice of a mind sifting through a problem [and] circling it, animated by sorting it out. We enter Manguso’s mind — her puzzle, pleased to be puzzled, too.” Leslie Jamison of The Atlantic added that Manguso’s “prose feels twice distilled; it’s whiskey rather than beer,” while Joshua James Amberson of the Portland Mercury calls it “perspective-altering.”
Manguso received her master of fine arts from the University of Iowa. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, the New School, the Pratt Institute, the Otis College of Art and Design, and St. Mary’s College, where she was a distinguished visiting writer. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, Manguso currently serves as the Mary Routt Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College in Los Angeles.
Manguso’s reading is part of the Mary E. Rolling Series, a program within Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English that receives generous support from Penn State’s 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. The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence is sponsored by Steven Fisher, a 1970 English alumnus.