UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Celebrated fiction writer Ali Araghi 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 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, in Foster Auditorium (102 Paterno Library) on Penn State’s University Park campus.
Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator and winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing. His writings and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Asymptote, among other places. His debut novel, “The Immortals of Tehran,” was published in 2020 and has since been translated into Dutch and Arabic.
Araghi’s translations of contemporary Iranian poetry include Allahverdi’s “ConQuest” and “I Am a Face Sympathizing with Your Grief.” As a part of his doctoral dissertation, Araghi created “Persian, Translated,” a database of Persian literature in English. This online resource collects granular metadata of literature translated into English with a focus on modern Iranian literature.
Araghi earned his master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and his doctorate in comparative literature, international writers track, at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently teaching fiction as an assistant visiting professor at Penn State.
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.