Celebrated poet and Penn State visiting assistant professor Noah Davis 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. on Thursday, Sept. 10, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, at Penn State University Park.
Davis is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at Penn State. He grew up in Tipton and writes about the Allegheny Front. Davis's second poetry collection, "The Last Beast We Revel In," was published in 2025 by CavanKerry Press. Davis's first collection, "Of This River," won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University's Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, The Christian Science Monitor, Orion, Best New Poets, The Year's Best Sports Writing, Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, among others. He also co-edited "A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia," published by University of Georgia Press, with Todd Davis and Carolyn G. Mahan. His work has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University.
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 2026-27 series can be found at creativewriting.psu.edu.
