UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Critically acclaimed writer Jai Chakrabarti will visit the Penn State University Park campus and read from his works to kick off the 2024-25 Mary E. Rolling Reading Series. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium. 

An O. Henry and Pushcart Prize winner, Chakrabarti is the author of the novel “A Play for the End of the World” (Knopf, 2021), which received the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. The novel also was recognized as the Association of Jewish Libraries’ Honor Book, was a finalist for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Chakrabarti also is the author of “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness” (Knopf, 2023), which was included in several end-of-year lists, including The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. His short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions and elsewhere, as well as performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space.

Chakrabarti’s nonfiction has been widely published in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from Brooklyn College. Chakrabarti also is a trained computer scientist.

Born in Kolkata, India, Chakrabarti currently lives in New York with his family and is a faculty member at Bennington Writing Seminars.

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 2024-25 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.