UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Award-winning fiction writer Rion Amilcar Scott will offer a reading as part of the 2025-26 Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 29, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium at Penn State's University Park campus. The reading is free and open to the public.
Scott’s story collection, “The World Doesn’t Require You” (Norton/Liveright, August 2019), was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and winner of the 2020 Towson Prize for Literature. His debut story collection, “Insurrections” (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), received the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Scott’s work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, Best Small Fictions 2020 and The Rumpus, among others. His story, “Shape-ups at Delilah’s,” was published in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020.
Scott holds a master of fine arts degree from George Mason University, where he won the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, a Completion Fellowship and an Alumni Exemplar Award. He also has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Kimbilio and the Colgate Writing Conference, as well as a 2019 Maryland Individual Artist Award. Raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland.
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 for this academic year’s series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.