UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Nonfiction and poetry writer Kelle Groom 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, October 12, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. 

Kelle Groom is the author of “I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl,” which was named New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice in 2011. “I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl” was also named B&N Discover Great New Writers, a Literary Journal Best Memoir, Barnes and Noble Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor’s Pick. Her essays have appeared in journals such as The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, AGNI, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among others.

Groom was previously Distinguished Writer-in- Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe. She is now a nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine and is director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts. She now lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Groom’s latest release “How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays,” was published by Tupelo Press on October 1st, 2023.

LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet, Eileen Myles characterizes the book of essays this way: “It’s really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in “violet rain”, flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being “a bare faced reader” is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story, there is a child and I think it her own becoming.”

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 2023-24 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.