UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Best-selling novelist, essayist and editor Elizabeth Benedict will read at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 24, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium. Part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series, this event is free and open to the public.
Benedict is the author of five novels, including the best-seller "Almost," and National Book Award finalist "Slow Dancing." She has served as editor of two acclaimed anthologies, "Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives" and The New York Times best-seller "What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most." Her most recent anthology, "Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession," is set to be released Sept. 29.
Benedict’s work has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Harper's Bazaar and other publications. Her debut novel, "Slow Dancing," published in 1985, was short listed for the National Book Award, and her novel "Almost" was selected by Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan as one of the top five novels of 2001. Hallie Ephron of The Boston Globe called her most recent novel, "The Practice of Deceit," "a wickedly funny literary suspense novel," and Publisher’s Weekly added that it is an “intelligently written and briskly plotted update on the femme fatale story.” Benedict has taught and coached creative writing for more than 20 years, and her book "The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers" is regularly used in writing programs.
The reading series, which runs from September through April, is sponsored by Penn State’s Department of English. Additional sponsorship for this event is provided by the Mary E. Rolling Endowment, the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, the Paterno Fellows Program, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, the University Libraries, and the College of the Liberal Arts.
The complete 2015-16 Mary E. Rolling Reading Series schedule is as follows (with all readings taking place at 7:30 pm in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library, on the University Park campus):
Sept. 24 – Elizabeth Benedict, fiction and essay
Oct. 29– Ted Kooser, poetry
Nov. 12– Merrill Gilfillan, nonfiction and poetry
Jan. 21 – Charlotte Holmes, fiction
Feb. 11 – Aryn Kyle, fiction
March 24 – Kate Daniels, poetry
April 7—Tom Williams, fiction
For additional information, email acj137@psu.edu or visit http://sites.psu.edu/psuwriters/.