Nationally renowned fiction writer Jai Chakrabarti 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 19, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

O. Henry and Pushcart Prize winner Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf ’21), which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. The novel was also recognized as the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, a finalist for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Chakrabarti is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf), which was among 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 and performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space.

Chakrabarti’s nonfiction has been widely published in journals 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 an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Chakrabarti is also a trained computer scientist.

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