UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nonfiction writer and Penn State alumna Krista Eastman will read from her works as the next featured speaker in 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, Feb. 23, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium at University Park.
Eastman is the author of “The Painted Forest,” which was named one of the best literary nonfiction debuts of 2019 by Poets & Writers magazine. “The Painted Forest” also won the Council for Wisconsin Writers’ Nonfiction Book Award and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review and have been named Notable in Best American Essays.
West Virginia University Press, publisher of “The Painted Forest,” characterizes the book of essays this way: “Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from … uncovers strange and little-known ‘home places’ — not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the ‘under-imagined and overly caricatured’ Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance.” Reviewer Caryl Pagel calls it a “a surprising and tender book in which a reader might be reminded of the considered natural observations of Annie Dillard, the unrelenting gaze of Lia Purpura, or the masterful storytelling of Jo Ann Beard. Eastman is interested in interrogating the history and ethos of several specific places … as well as elegantly demonstrating the ways in which landscapes shift and morph through generations and recall.”
Eastman was born and raised in the Driftless hills of Wisconsin. After living in Senegal, France, Antarctica, and the eastern United States, she returned to Wisconsin, where she lives with her partner and young son. Eastman received her master of fine arts in creative writing from Penn State in 2010.
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 2022-23 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.