Award-winning author Stephanie Powell Watts to visit Schlow

STATE COLLEGE — Schlow Centre Region Library is hosting an evening with bestselling novelist Stephanie Powell Watts at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22, in the library’s Downsbrough Community Room.

Watts’s debut novel, “No One Is Coming to Save Us,” was named one of the best books in 2017 by Entertainment Weekly, W Magazine, Redbook and The Chicago Review of Books. It also won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.

The book follows the return of a successful native son to his home in North Carolina and his attempt to join the only family he ever wanted, but never had. Watts described the book as, “Imagine ‘The Great Gatsby’ set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people.”

Watts was born in the foothills of North Carolina. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She now lives with her husband and son in Pennsylvania, where she is an associate professor at Lehigh University.

Discussions on “No One Is Coming to Save Us” will take place during Schlow Library’s Evening Book Club meeting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 18, and during the Afternoon Book Club meeting at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 26. Both meetings are held in the library’s Sun Room.

An Evening with Stephanie Powell Watts is sponsored by Penn State University Libraries, the American Association of University Women, and the Schlow Library Foundation.