State College native and Penn State alumnus Sunil Yapa will return to campus Wednesday, March 21 to discuss his debut novel, “Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist“ in Freeman auditorium in the HUB at 7 p.m. Yapa will deliver an additional reading from his novel on Thursday, March 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the Nittany Lion Inn.

Yapa graduated from Penn State in 2002 with a degree in geography before earning a master’s degree in fiction from Hunter College in New York. He now teaches at Sierra Nevada College and lives in central Pennsylvania.

“Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist” was published in 2016 and tells the story of the 1999 World Trade Center Organization protests in Seattle from a variety of different character perspectives. The novel was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was also recognized by Amazon as one of the best books of 2016 and was included in the Washington Post’s list of notable fiction in 2016.

Both events are free and open to the public. You can find additional information on Yapa’s discussion and reading here.