Nationally recognized writer 'Pemi Aguda will begin 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 11, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus.

’Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

Her short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine. Ghostroots, her debut story collection, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards in Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

W. W. Norton, Virago, and Masobe published Ghostroots in 2024, and will publish her novel, One Leg on Earth, in 2026.

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.