Renowned feminist poet and Penn State Professor Emerita Robin Becker will offer a reading from her new collection, Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, to conclude 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, April 16, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

Midsummer Count, published by the University of New Mexico Press, features her best work from eight previous books alongside nearly thirty new poems that demonstrate Becker’s lifelong exploration of poetic form as well as Jewish identity, lesbian life, and the experiences of a daughter, lover, and teacher, with attention to beauty, grief, and compassion. Becker published six books in the Pitt Poetry Series, among them, Lambda-Award winning All American Girl and most recently The Black Bear Inside Me. Her book reviews and poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry, and Slate, and she long served as Poetry Editor for The Women's Review of Books where she wrote a column on the contemporary poetry scene, "Field Notes.” Her awards include fellowships from the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and GLAGS at CUNY.

In 2017, Robin Becker retired from Penn State as Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies. To honor Becker’s service as a beloved professor and accomplished poet, the Creative Writing Program launched a crowdfunding campaign to create the Robin Becker Award in Creative Writing which gives financial assistance to a student who demonstrates promise in creative writing, poetry in particular. Steven Fisher, a 1970 Penn State graduate in English and benefactor of the Creative Writing Program, launched the campaign to establish the Award. BA/MA student, Ky McKenna, is the recipient of the Robin Becker Award in Creative Writing this year.

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 2025-26 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.