enowned writer Ellen Wayland-Smith 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 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 24, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. 

Ellen Wayland-Smith is the author of two books of American cultural history, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador 2016) and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (UChicago Press, 2020). Her most recent book, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.

She covers memoir and nonfiction for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her personal essays and cultural criticism have appeared in the LA Times, The American Scholar, Guernica, Orion, The Boston Review, Aeon Magazine, and The New Republic, among other places.

She is a professor in the Writing Program and the English Department at the University of Southern California.

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 University Libraries. A full list of readings in the 2026-27 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.