New York Magazine: Literary Idol

Literary Stars of Tomorrow to Read at KGB Bar

New York mag presents young talents from “Literary Idol” feature

New York, NY – New York magazine contributing editor Boris Kachka will host the “Literary Idol Reading." Readers Mark Edmund Doten, Elliott Holt, Martin Hyatt, Maaza Mengiste, and David Rogers were among the writers featured in the magazine’s young author talent-scouting special that ran in June, having been singled out as especially promising by writing teachers. 

A former associate editor at The Huffington Post, Mark Edmund Doten’s work will be included in novelist Dennis Cooper’s collection Userlands: New Fiction Writers From the Blogging Underground. He is working on the novel Green Zone Kidz, to consist of linked short stories in the voices of Bush officials, vets, and Osama bin Laden. Doten is a graduate of Columbia’s MFA program and a native of Cottage Grove, Minnesota.

Elliott Holt just graduated from the MFA program at Brooklyn College, where she was a recipient of the Himan Brown Award in creative writing. She won 2nd prize in the 2006 Zoetrope:All-Story Short fiction contest (judged by Mary Gaitskill), was one of three finalists for the 2006 Missouri Review Editors' Prize, and was a finalist for the 2007 Iowa Review Award. She grew up in Washington, DC, and has lived in Moscow, London, and Amsterdam. She now lives in Brooklyn and is trying to write a novel about expats in Moscow in the late 1990's.

A native of Louisiana, Martin Hyatt is a graduate from The New School's MFA Program.  His thesis became a novel entitled A Scarecrow's Bible, which was published last year.  His book was named a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and The Violet Quill Award.  It was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association, and received The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.  He is currently putting the final touches on his new novel, Grit, My Love, a story of working-class dreams and troubled lives in the deep south.

Maaza Mengiste graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she teaches. She is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee in nonfiction and her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Dragonfire, Ninth Letter, and 42opus, has been translated and published into German and Romanian for Lettre International, and can be found in the Seal Press anthology Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place and Time. She's currently completing a novel that takes place during the Communist revolution in Ethiopia, and writing a collection of short stories based on musicians.

David Rogers has a degree in non-profit arts administration from Hampshire College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College.  He has worked as a temp, a medical transcriptionist in an oncology clinic, a music teacher, an usher and, currently, as an associate editor at Picador.  His fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review.