Accomplished fiction writer Kanza Javed will offer a reading on Thursday, October 9 at 5:30pm in 102 Burrowes Building (Grucci Room) on the Penn State University Park campus.

Kanza Javed holds an MPhil from Kinnaird College for Women and an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University, where she received the Rebecca Mason Perry Prize. She is the winner of the Reynolds Price Prize for Fiction and has been a finalist for the New Millennium Writing Award, the Salamander Short Fiction Contest, and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her debut novel, Ashes, Wine and Dust, was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. Javed’s short fiction has appeared in American Literary Review, The Punch Magazine, Salamander, Greensboro Review, Narrating Pakistan and The Malahat Review. Most recently, her work was featured in Oxford University Press’, In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature, edited by Muneeza Shamsie. Her collection of short stories What Remains After a Fire was published by W.W. Norton in September of 2025.