Meet Marian Szczepanski, author of Playing St. Barbara, on screen at our fully interactive visiting author program.

The granddaughter of immigrant coal miners, Marian Szczepanski grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and lived as a young child in the Jamison Coal Company house where her mother and aunts were raised. Curiosity about her grandmothers’ lives led Marian to write her debut novel Playing St. Barbara.

Marian has won awards for short fiction and magazine feature writing and holds an MFA in fiction from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a BA in American Studies from the University of Notre Dame.