UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.—Nationally renowned fiction writer Jamil Jan Kochai will offer a reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 10, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium on the University Park campus. The reading is free and open to the public.
Kochai is the author of “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories,” which was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize.
His debut novel, “99 Nights in Logar,” was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Short Stories, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.
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 2024-25 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.