UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On Thursday, Sept. 24, writer and author Ellen Wayland-Smith will give a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series presented by the Creative Writing Program in Penn State’s Department of English.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6 p.m. in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, Penn State University Park.
A professor of writing at the University of Southern California, Wayland-Smith is the author of two books of American cultural history, “Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table” (Picador 2016) and “The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America” (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Her most recent book, “The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self,” was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024.
Wayland-Smith also covers memoir and nonfiction for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her personal essays and cultural criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the American Scholar, Guernica, Orion, Boston Review, Aeon Magazine, and the New Republic, among others.
The Mary E. Rolling Reading 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 2026-27 series can be found on the Creative Writing Program’s website.