KGB Bar

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf, 2004) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). Her third book of poems, Modern Life (Graywolf, 2007) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Cirlcle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first children’s book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel, was published by Tin House Books in 2009. An illustrated erasure, titled Of Lamb, with images by Amy Jean Porter, was published by McSweeney’s in 2010. Matthea is a contributing editor to jubilat, Meatpaper and BOMB. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets (2009). His spoken word album Elegies & Laments, a “soundtrack” to Sixty Sonnets recorded with rock band and orchestra, was issued by Pub Can Records in 2012. He supplies libretti and song texts for contemporary composers Stella Sung, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Christopher LaRosa. He also writes scripts and appears in short films for the post-punk conceptual band Mercury Radio Theater. His poems have appeared in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (2009), Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (2011), and two Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology (2011). He hosts the popular blog www.everseradio.com and works as an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.

Brenda Shaughnessy’s most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) She’s also the author of Human Dark with Sugar, which was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems have appeared in Harpers, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate.com and elsewhere.  She is Poetry Editor-At-Large at Tin House Magazine, and is Assistant Professor of English and in the M.F.A. Program at Rutgers-Newark.  She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.

Adam Berlin is the author of Both Members of the Club (Texas Review Press/winner of the 2012 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize), Belmondo Style (St. Martin’s Press/winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award) and Headlock (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).  His stories and poetry have appeared in numerous journals.  He teaches writing at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and co-edits J Journal: New Writing on Justice.  For more visit www.adamberlin.com

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War, which was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School. She was a founding editor of LIT, and she’s the poetry editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Thomas Heise is the author of a novel, Moth; or how I came to be with you again (Sarabande, 2013), a literary and historical monograph, Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2011), and a book of poetry, Horror Vacui (Sarabande, 2006). His poetry and essays have appeared widely, including in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Canary, Columbia Poetry Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and African American Review. He’s received the Robert Frost Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University. He divides his time between Montreal and New York City.

Annamaria Alfieri is the author of Invisible Country, her second historical mystery. Her novel City of Silver won critical acclaim. Deadly Pleasures Magazine called it one of the best first novels of the year, and the Washington Post said, “As both history and mystery, City of Silver glitters.” Writing as Patricia King, she is also the author of the short story “Baggage Claim,” in the anthology Queens Noir.  She lives in New York City.

Kevin Egan is the author of six novels. His current novel, Midnight, is a thriller set in the New York County Courthouse in Lower Manhattan, where he has worked as a law clerk and court administrator for over 20 years. His previous novels include the sci-fi Perseus Breed and a three-book mystery series published under the pen name Conor Daly. His short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Rosebud, and The Westchester Review.

Chris Grabenstein is the co-author with James Patterson of the #1 New York Times Bestseller I Funny. He is also an award-winning author of books for children and adults, a playwright, screenwriter, and former ad executive and improvisational comedian. Winner of two Anthony and three Agatha Awards, Grabenstein wrote for Jim Henson’s Muppets, was president of the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, and co-wrote the screenplay for the CBS-TV movie The Christmas Gift starring John Denver. He lives in New York City with his wife, three cats, and a rescue dog named Fred.

Kate Lincoln writes crime fiction and is a homeopath and EMT.  She has completed the first book in her Natural Crimes series, which features Det. Lt. Henry Tomasino and Thalia Sampson, a member of the near-extinct species Vespa Americanus, the American WASP.

Susan Olsen is the historian for the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Centuries ago when she was in graduate school studying history, she dreamed of writing books people actually read.  After moving to New York, she began crafting mysteries that exposed readers to historic figures, significant places, and the quirky characters that work in the history business.  She is in the middle of her second novel and has finally started to look for an agent.

Cathi Stoler, an award-winning advertising creative director/copywriter, has turned her hand to writing mysteries, including Telling Lies, Keeping Secrets, and The Hard Way, all of which feature P.I. Helen McCorkendale and magazine editor Laurel Imperiole. Next up for her is a new series starting with Bar None: A Murder On The Rocks Mystery, set in lower Manhattan with female bar owner Jude Dillane. Stoler considers being here tonight a great opportunity to continue her research.

Sheila York’s first novel, Star Struck Dead, won a Daphne du Maurier Award as Best Mainstream Mystery/Suspense of the Year. It was nominated as Best First Mystery by the Romantic Times. Her two other Lauren Atwill mysteries include A Good Knife’s Work and Death in Her Face. York serves as treasurer of the New York regional chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, with her husband, novelist David F. Nighbert.

Virginia Pye’s debut novel, River of Dust, is an Indie Next Pick for May, 2013. Annie Dillard called it, “Terrific, tremendous, wonderful...a strong, beautiful, deep book.” Virginia’s award-winning short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, including The North American Review, Failbetter, The Baltimore Review and Tampa Review. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, taught writing at New York University and University of Pennsylvania. In conjunction with the publication of River of Dust her essays and interviews are forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, The Huffington Post and The New York Times. Please visit her at www.virginiapye.com

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, author, poet, spoken word performer, and playwright, John Biscello has called Taos, New Mexico home for the past eleven years.  He has staged four of his full-length plays and a trio of one-acts in Taos.  He is the author of the short fiction novel--Broken Land, A Brooklyn Tale, and a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, which revolves around Bensonhurst, the neighborhood in which he grew up. 

His fiction and poetry have appeared in: Art Times, nthposition, The Wanderlust Review, Ophelia Street, Caper, Polyphony, Militant Roger, Farmhouse,The Iconoclast, and various other journals and magazines. 

Donald Dewey has published 33 books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama for such houses as, HarperCollins, Little, Brown, and Carroll and Graf. His biographies of actors Marcello Mastroianni and James Stewart have been widely translated. His novels include Wake Up and Smell the Bees and, to be published in June, The Man Who Hated History.

Renzo Oliva was born in Bracciano, Italy, and has spent most of his life in the diplomatic service, retiring as Vice Consul of Italy in Philadelphia. The Russian literary magazine, Zvezda (Star) published his experimental novel, Wonderland.  During 2002 in St. Petersburg, he won first prize at the “4th International Festival of Performance and Experimental Art,” as well as the “Pushkin Prize.” Since 1996 he devotes himself to Scrap Art, which he discovered during a holiday on the island of Mallorca, Spain. He has had 20 solo exhibitions and has participated in many group exhibitions internationally.  His detective-historical novel, The Mayakovsky’s Pistol, is coming out in Italy this year. 

Frank Polizzi’s poems and stories have appeared in The Archer, Electric Acorn, Mudfish, Paterson Literary Review, Wired Art and others. In April 2009,the Guild of Italian American Actors (GIAA) conducted a reading of his one-act play, By the Light of a Barber Pole. In March 2011, Finishing Line Press published a chapbook of his poems, All Around Town, centering on his experiences in NYC and Sicilian American roots. Several chapter/stories were published from his first novel, A Pity Beyond All Telling, and one of them was shortlisted for the Fish Prize in Ireland. He is currently finishing work on a second novel set in San Francisco and Italy during World War II.

Ken Baumann lives in Los Angeles. He’s worked as an actor in film, TV, theatre, and commercials for ten years. He currently stars in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which wraps up this year. His writing’s been published at VICE, Juked, HTMLGiant, The New York Tyrant, and a few other places. His first novel, SOLIP, releases from Tyrant Books in 2013. His second book, SAY, CUT, MAP, releases from Blue Square Press a bit later. He runs Sator Press, a nonprofit that publishes innovative literature. He will most likely die one day. He wants you to ignore all of this.

Michael Kimball is the author of six books, including Big Ray, Dear Everybody, Us, and, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as in The Guardian, Bomb, and New York Tyrant.

Kendra Grant Malone was born in 1984. Her first book of poetry, Everything is Quiet, was published by Scrambler Books in 2010. Her second book of poetry, Morocco, co-written with Matthew Savoca was published by Dark Sky Books in 2011. She lives in Brooklyn. Read more about her at kendragrantmalone.com.

Matthew Savoca was born in 1982 in Pennsylvania and now lives in New York and PA where he works as a carpenter. His book, “I Don’t Know I Said” was just put out by Publishing Genius in April. 

Last reading of the series before a short hiatus.

The MWA Reading Series features established and emerging authors from the Mystery Writers of America.

Jillian Abbott’s short stories have won awards in the U.S. and Australia. A former reporter at various New York weeklies, she has had work published in Queens Noir, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Independent (UK), and The Writer magazine. Abbott currently teaches English and digital writing at LIU and CUNY. She is currently at work on a new mystery series as well as her second thriller.

USA Today and international bestselling author Alison Gaylin has been nominated for the Edgar, the RT Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award. She has six books in print, and her seventh novel—and her first YA mystery Reality Ends Here—is out June 11 from Simon & Schuster/PocketStar.

Nancy Hughes murders people. She made the leap from journalist/media/community relations and PR practitioner to follow her heart and write mystery novels. Three manuscripts later, she awaits the right agent and publisher.

Native New Yorker Ken Posthauer abandoned his business career to explore the mysteries of writing fiction. He loves working on murder, espionage, seduction, deception and creating the usual suspects. He is looking forward to writing outdoors in the warmer weather.

Cornelia Read is the author of Field of Darkness, The Crazy School, Invisible Boy, and Valley of Ashes. She has been nominated for an Edgar and won the Shamus Award for best short story as well as a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Manhattan and Dutchess County (this week, anyway), and somehow manages to circumnavigate the globe in her spare time.

S.A. Solomon has had her crime fiction and commentary published in New Jersey Noir and The Noose, and she has live-tweeted coverage of Newark, N.J., criminal proceedings. She once received reader feedback on her fiction in the gallery at a murder trial - from defense counsel. There was no word on what the prosecution thought. She has written legal commentary and analysis for LexisNexis, Bloomberg BNA, American Law Media, and others. She is an attorney licensed in New York and Florida and has completed 80 hours of training in Medico-legal Death Investigation.

R.J. (Ralph) Westerhoff, known as “Cookie” to his intimates, has been writing since he first scrawled with a purple crayon on his green bedroom wall.  He spent more than two decades in advertising as a copywriter and creative director.  He is currently working on pieces in both the noir and the historical mystery genres, though his success can be judged by the deep furrows of consternation scratched into his Klingon-like forehead. 

Elizabeth Zelvin is a psychotherapist and the author of Death Will Get You Sober and other mysteries featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler. Three of Zelvin’s short stories have been nominated for the Agatha Award and one for the Derringer Award. Her work includes two books of poetry and Outrageous Older Woman, a CD of original songs.

Tim Liardet has produced seven collections of poetry. His third collection Competing with the Piano Tuner was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and his fourth— To the God of Rain— a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2003.The Blood Choir, his fifth collection, won an Arts Council England Writer’s Award as a collection-in-progress, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2006 and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for best collection of that year. The Storm House, his seventh collection, was published by Carcanet in June 2011. Madame Sasoo Goes Bathing, a pamphlet, appears this year; his next full collection is due from Carcanet in September 2014; his New and Selected Poems, from the same publisher, in September 2015. He is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University, England.

Jennifer Militello’s first collection, Flinch of Song, won the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and her second collection, Body Thesaurus, was named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She is also author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have been published widely in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, anthologized in Best New Poets 2008, and awarded the Barbara Bradley Award from the New England Poetry Club, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press, and the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review. In addition, she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Marina Gottlieb Sarles: The Last Daughter of Prussia (April, 2013)
Joy E. Stocke: Anatolian Days & Nights (March, 2012)
Kim Nagy: Triple Goddess Trials: Meeting Virginia Woolf at the Strand (from a column published on Wild River)

Marina Gottlieb Sarles: An island girl from the Bahamas, author Sarles not only speaks two languages (English and German) but grew up in two different worlds. As the daughter of German immigrants, who escaped Nazi Germany at the end of World War II by swimming across the Rhine River with guns firing at their backs, Sarles daydreamed about the Europe they had left behind. Sarles has been published in the Macmillan Caribbean anthology, Under the Perfume Tree, and ESPN produced a special feature based on her short stories. Her essay, “Auschwitz, Stutthof and Remembrance” was featured in Wild River Review. The Last Daughter of Prussia (April, 2012), a saga of love and war, is Sarles’s debut novel and has already been heralded as one of the most moving animal stories ever written.

Kim Nagy is the Co- founder and Executive Editor of Wild River Review.  Nagy is an author, experienced editor and professional storyteller. She received her BA in history at Rider University where she was influenced by professors who stressed works of literature alongside dates and historical facts--as well as the importance of including the perspectives of women and minorities in the historical record. After graduate school at the University of Connecticut, Nagy applied her academic expertise to a career in publishing, in which she worked for two of the world’s foremost publishers—-Princeton University Press and W.W. Norton. Nagy is working on a forthcoming collection of mythology/ memoir, called The Triple Goddess Trials.

Joy E. Stocke, co-founder and Editor in Chief of Wild River Review, and founder of Wild River Books.  She has published fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and has written about and lectured widely on her travels in Greece and Turkey, as well as religion, ancient and modern. Her memoir, Anatolian Days and Nights: A Love Affair with Turkey, Land of Dervishes, Goddesses & Saints, based on more than ten years of travel through Turkey, co-written with Angie Brenner was published in March 2012 by Wild River Books.  Stocke has worked with numerous writers shepherding their books from conception to print.  She is currently writing a memoir about a village in which she lives in Baja Sur, Mexico.

Our line-up this month:

Joshua Howes is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, been honored by Glimmer Train and Southwest Review, and won the Bocock-Guerard Prize at Stanford. A former reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he has been a Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, co-wrote the BET award-winning short film “Jackson Parish,” and earned a National Golden Brad for his feature script A House Divided. His upcoming film Two Terrorists Meet stars Joan Chen. He’s currently writing a novel about the restless global middle-class set in Chicago, Cairo, and Calcutta. Learn more at joshuahowes.com.

James McGirk writes stories. His short fiction has appeared in Fence, Gigantic, 3am magazine, NNATAN, 3quarkdaily and The Drum, and will appear soon in Manhattan magazine. His first novel, Indian Made Foreign Liquor, is looking for a home. He also writes essays and articles. Visit jamesmcgirk.com for more information.

Jessica Hindman’s work has appeared in O. The Oprah Magazine and Invisible Citizens: Youth Politics after 9/11. She is a winner of the Hands Across the Middle East essay contest and Joyous Publishing’s Fiction Contest. She has worked as a freelance researcher for The New York Times Magazine and MTV, where she was the first person to compile research on the show that would later become the nationwide hit Teen Mom.  She also worked as a reporter for the regional newspaper The Shenandoah Valley Herald, where she wrote stories with headlines like this: “Local Woman’s Lap a Pitstop for Flying Rodent.” She is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of North Texas, where she is finishing a memoir about her former life as a fake professional violinist.

Your host this month is Bryan VanDyke.

What is Columbia Selects?  The first Thursday of each month (except for January, when Wednesday prevails) the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series featuring Writing Program alumni. These fresh talents are finished with or near to finished with their first books, but do not yet have a book contract and/or an agent. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success. This is your chance to glimpse who you’ll be reading in 2014!

Columbia Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke and Emily Austin.

Liars’ League NYC is a monthly live literary journal featuring professional actors reading original short stories by both up-and-coming and well-established writers. Selected stories are read live, published online, recorded for download, and available for free in the iTunes Store. Each Liars’ League NYC show is themed - if you’re interested in either submitting or reading a story, please see www.liarsleaguenyc.com for full details. Hosted by Andrew Lloyd-Jones and Liars’ League NYC.

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright:

Upon arriving in New York in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark’s Church. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry. In the late 1970s he performed at PS122’s avant-garde-arama. He started Hard Press in 1978 where he published three books, including the anthology 3-Zero, Turning Thirty, and 100 postcards by different artists and poets. A selection of the postcards were included in the book A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, and were displayed at New York Public Library. Wright read often at St. Mark’s Poetry Project between 1979 and 1990 and served a three-year term on the Project Board of Directors. In 1996, Wright performed in two of the Museum of Modern Art’s poetry series curated by Lita Hornick.

Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire.  She began her investigative reporting career at The New York Post when she took an internship her senior year of high school. She has been at The Post for ten years, and now works as the paper’s books editor. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, and Glamour UK.

Mike Doughty is generally a singer/songwriter; his last two albums are Yes and Also Yes and The Flip Is Another Honey. He was born in Kentucky; he grew up in Kansas, Belgium, and on the grounds of the US Military Academy at West Point. He’s currently making an album reimagining 13 songs from his first band, Soul Coughing, with the producer DJ Good Goose. He’ll be reading tonight from his 2012 memoir, The Book of Drugs.”

George Gurley was a staff writer for the New York Observer from 1996 to 2009. During that time he also freelanced for Vanity Fair, GQ, Marie Claire, and others. His couples therapy memoir George & Hilly: Anatomy of a Relationship was published in January 2012 by Simon & Schuster. Hilly agreed to marry George last summer at the Brooklyn Municipal Building and he wrote about it in Town & Country Weddings. So far this year he has also written for The Observer, The New York Times’ Styles, and Marie Claire.

Rone Shavers is a writer who publishes in multiple genres. His work has appeared in ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, BOMB Magazine, EBR: Electronic Book Review, Pank magazine, The Quarterly Conversation, and Thought Catalog . He is Assistant Professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where he teaches fiction and serves as coordinator of the MFA in Creative Writing program.

Marc Spitz is a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, author and director (the upcoming play Revenge and Guilt which will debut in this very building at the Kraine on 9/19/13). Spitz’s novel How Soon Is Never (Three Rivers Press/Random House 2003) concerning the efforts of two aging music writers as they attempt to reunite the Smiths is currently being adapted for the screen.  He will be reading from his 2013 release Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown Manhattan in the 90s. 

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which was also on the Best Books of 2011 Lists from the San Francisco Chronicle, The Providence Journal, Bookmarks Magazine and Kirkus Reviews. Her 10th novel, Is this Tomorrow came out this May. A book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and People, she’s also a writing instructor at Stanford University and UCLA online. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Salon, More, and more. The recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant, she was also a National Magazine Award Nominee, and her script for Is This Tomorrow was a Sundance Screenwriting Lab Finalist. She lives in Hoboken with her husband, the writer and editor Jeff Tamarkin and their teenaged son.

Jessica Anya Blau’s new book THE WONDER BREAD SUMMER (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial) is out on June first. She is the author of the best-selling novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, and the critically acclaimed DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME.

ALLISON AMEND, is the author of the Independent Publisher Book Award–winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novel Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book
Award. Her latest novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy, was published in April. She lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College.

Elizabeth Crane is the author of three collections of short stories, most recently You Must Be This Happy to Enter.  She is a recipient of the Chicago Public Library 21st Century Award. Her work has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater.  Her debut novel, We Only Know So Much, is out now from HarperPerennial. 

Last reading of the series before summer hiatus.

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Carol Bartold is a Delaware native and Bronxville, New York resident Carol Bartold graduated with Honors in Music from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia and studied Business Administration at California State University, Los Angeles.  She worked as an auditor for Price Waterhouse, financial analyst for 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, and controller for TreePeople Inc.  She holds the Master in Fine Arts degree in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.  She is the senior reporter for www.MyHometownBronxville.com.  When she isn’t writing or recording debits and credits, Bartold sings at Christ Church, Concordia College and with the Sarah Lawrence College Women’s Vocal Ensemble and Chamber Choir.

Kirsten Major was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and holds an MFA from Cornell University, where she restored a 1968 Volkswagen Squareback and then accidentally blew it up a month later.  Her writing has appeared in various magazines and journals, including the Rake, Chelsea, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and Popular Mechanics.  She is, so far as she knows, the only author of a New York Times’ Modern Love Column that was not about her own love life.  Kirsten will be reading from “Student Loans in Outer Space,” which will be released in Sept 2013.

Richard Jeffrey Newman writes about the impact of feminism on his life as a man and of classical Persian poetry on our lives as Americans. His books include The Silence of Men, a volume of poetry, and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, a translation of part of the Iranian national epic. He curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Queens and is on the Board of Directors of Newtown Literary Alliance, a Queens-based literary non-profit. He is professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY. His website is www.richardjnewman.com.

Annapurna Potluri was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and moved to New York to attend New York University where she studied comparative literature and linguistics. She then earned an MPhil in theoretical linguistics from Cambridge University. She has lived in Italy and India and is currently working at the South Asia Institute at Columbia University.

Tara Ison has been described by Carolyn See as “an important new voice in fiction.” In addition to her novels, her short fiction and essays have been published in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies. Ison is currently Assistant Professor of Fiction at Arizona State University.

Eileen Myles was born in Boston and moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Snowflake/different streets (poems, 2012) is the latest of her 18 books. Inferno (a poet’s novel) came out in 2010. For The Importance of Being Iceland/travel essays in art she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. In 2010 the Poetry Society of America awarded Eileen the Shelley Prize. She is a Prof. Emeritus of Writing at UC San Diego. She’s a 2012 Guggenheim fellow. She lives in New York.

Rebecca Wolff is an award-winning poet and founding editor of Fence and Fence Books. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of three books of poems: Manderly (University of Illinois Press, 2001), Figment (Norton, 2004), and The King (Norton, 2009), as well as the novel The Beginners (Riverhead, 2011).  Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review and A Public Space.  Wolff lives in Athens, New York and teaches at the NY State Writers Institute in poetry and creative writing. 

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Huffington Post, SiriusXM, WNYC) invites some of NY’s top writers, comedians, and storytellers to share true, bizarre tales about their lives. There’s live accordion music, a challenging trivia game, and a free wine giveaway where one lucky audience member will walk away with their very own bottle of Sideshow Sauce! Tonight’s stellar lineup includes stories from:

Kambri Crews (author “Burn Down the Ground")

Thomas Pryor (The New York Times, author “River to River")

Joey Novick (Comedy Central)

Joanne Solomon (The Moth)

Music by Dr. Leona Godin

* Time Out NY “Critics’ Pick”
* NY Daily News “Editor’s Pick”
* “a well-programmed night” - The New York Times

DORE KIESSELBACH’s work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry, FIELD, Antioch Review and New Letters.  In 2009 he won Britain’s Bridport Prize in poetry, and in 2011 the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.  His first collection, Salt Pier, appeared last fall in the Pitt Poetry Series.  He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the civil rights attorney Karin Ciano.

MICHAEL MORSE’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, jubilat, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, and The Best American Poetry, 2012. He lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and teaches at The Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

WILL SCHUTT’s debut collection of poems, Westerly, was chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and will be released this spring. Schutt’s poems and translations have appeared in Agni, FIELD, Harvard Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oberlin College and Hollins University, he lives with his wife in Wainscott, New York. 

Matthew Hittinger is an American poet and writer currently based in New York City.  His titles include Skin Shift (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012) and the chapbooks Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009), Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009), and Pear Slip (Spire Press, 2007) winner of the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award. Born and raised in Bethlehem, PA, not far from the grave of H.D., Matthew was named a 2012 debut poet by Poets & Writers Magazine and has received the Kay Deeter Award from the journal Fine Madness, two Sundress Best of the Net nominations, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations.

Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry and the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Audre Lorde Award, and the California Book Award for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including two recent volumes of the Best New Poets series. A lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis, and Nonfiction Editor for California Northern, she is currently at work on a second book of poems and a collection of linked essays.

Owen Egerton is one of the talents behind the award-winning The Sinus Show and Master Pancake Theater at the Alamo Drafthouse Theatre, and for several years was the artistic director of Austin’s National Comedy Theatre. He’s written screenplays for Fox, Warner Brothers, and Disney studios. He is also the author of the one-man play The Other Side of Sleep and the novel The Book of Harold, which is currently in development as a television series with Warner Brothers Television. He lives in Austin, Texas. He reads from his novel,Everyone Says That At The End Of The World.

“A brainy, often riotous, ultimately moving Cat’s Cradle for our time, peopled with reluctant seekers of spiritual nourishment who might have stepped from the pages of Flannery O’Connor.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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Dennis Mahoney is a writer who lives in upstate New York. He reads from his novel: Fellow Mortals
“FELLOW MORTALS, while full of vivid interactions, is perhaps most moving in its subtle depiction of people alone, trying to find ordinary meaning amid disarray…. [It] will stay with me for its watchful portrait of people, imperfect in life as in art, trying to find goodness in one another and themselves.” The New York Times
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Susan Daitch is the author of the novels Paper Conspiracies, L.C., and The Colorist, as well as the story collection Storytown. Her latest title is Fall Out, a novella published by Madras Press which will benefit the organization Women for Afghan Women.

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Award-winning storyteller and Huffington Post blogger Leslie Goshko hosts tonight’s curated evening of original poetic works that’s sure to Kick Assonance! Join co-creators Kyle Erickson ("Enduro’s Lament") and Steven Leyva ("Low Parish") as they welcome internationally renowned poet Valzhyna Mort and author Tyler Sage for an evening that Time Out New York magazine named a “Critics’ Pick.”

Tonight’s Readers:

Kyle Erickson is co-creator of the poetry series Kick Assonance, which has been noted by the Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, hailed as a “Critics’ Pick” by Time Out New York Magazine, and called “a notable New York Event” by The Rumpus. Kyle’s work can be read in This Land Press, Promethia, B’More Poetic, and on his blog, okieinthecity.com, which was heralded as a “Top 101 New York Blog.” His first book of poetry, Enduro’s Lament, was released last fall.

Steven Leyva is the author of the recently released book of poetry, Low Parish, and co-creator of the poetry series Kick Assonance. His poems have appeared in Welter, The Light Ekphrastic, and The Cobalt Review where his poem “Rare in the East” won the 2012 Cobalt Review Poetry Prize. He holds a MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he teaches in the undergraduate writing program.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus and moved to the United States in 2005. She is the author of Factory of Tears (2008) and Collected Body (2011), both published by Copper Canyon Press.

Artist Residencies:

LiteraturHaus NO, Krems, Austria (July 2011)
Alice Yard Artist Residency, Port of Spain, Trinidad (January 2010)
Literarisches Haus Graz Fellowship, Graz, Austria (July 2009)
Sylt Quelle Residency, Sylt, Germany (May-June 2009)
Literarisches Colloquium Berlin Fellowship, Germany (May 2006)
Gaude Polonia Fellowship, Warsaw, Poland (January-May 2005)

Tyler Sage has recent fiction and essays in Story Quarterly, The L.A. Review of Books, Barrelhouse, PANK, New South, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Baltimore.

Suzanne Palmieri (AKA Suzanne Hayes) is an author, a teacher, and the mother of three little witches. Her debut novel, THE WITCH OF LITTLE ITALY was published by Saint Martin’s/Griffin has sold internationally. Her co-authored novel, I’LL BE SEEING YOU (written as Suzanne Hayes) will be published by Mira books on May 28, 2013, and has also sold internationally. She lives by the ocean in Connecticut with her husband and three darling witches. Suzanne is represented by Anne Bohner of Pen and Ink Literary.

Deirdre Sinnott’s personal essays have appeared in various literary magazines and websites. RIGHT-SIZED RATS, a chapter from her upcoming memoir, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and her essay OUTSIDE won Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest 79th Annual Writing Competition in 2010 and the Remember in November Contest at Hippocampus Magazine. She has won many scholarships for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. For more information visit www.DeirdreSinnott.com.

Jim Warner is the author of two poetry collections TOO BAD IT’S POETRY and SOCIAL STUDIES (Paper Kite Press). His poetry has appeared in The North American Review, PANK Magazine, Word Riot, and other journals. Jim received his MFA at Wilkes University. Follow him on Twitter: @whoismisterjim.

Amye Archer has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University.  Her work has appeared in [PANK], Twins Magazine, Provincetown Arts, The Ampersand Review, H_ngm_n, Boston Literary Magazine, and Hippocampus.  Her first chapbook, NO ONE EVER LOOKS UP was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Her latest chapbook, A SHOTGUN LIFE, was published by Big Table Publishing in 2011.  Her memoir, FAT GIRL, SKINNY, is represented by the Einstein Thompson Agency.  Her first play, SURVIVING, was produced locally as part of the Jason Miller Playwright’s Project. She is the winner of the first Scranton Storyslam and she hosts the reading series Prose in Pubs.  She is the former Reviews Editor for [PANK]. You can learn more about her at www.amyearcher.com.

Karen E. Bender is the author of the novel Like Normal People, and A Town of Empty Rooms, which was just published in January. Her fiction has appeared is The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Narrative, Story, The Harvard Review and other magazines and reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best and won two Pushcart Prizes. She has received grants from the NEA and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her story collection, Refund, is forthcoming.

Kelli Dunham (kellidunham.com) is everyone’s favorite ex-nun genderqueer nerdy nurse comic. Kelli was one of Velvet Park Magazine’s 25 Significant Queer Women of 2011 and was named to the 2012 Campus Pride Hotlist. Kelli was also given the The Fresh Fruit Festival Award for Distinction in stand-up comedy, although Kelli has never before or since been called distinguished. Kelli is a registered nurse and the author of four books of humorous non-fiction, including two children’s books being used by Sonlight conservative home schooling association in their science curriculum. Her fifth book, Freak of Nurture, a collection is humorous essays that none other than lesbian comedy godmother Kate Clinton called “laugh out loud outrageous storytelling” is being released by Topside Press in Spring 2013. The NYC release for Freak of Nurture is 5/18 at Sealy-Cuyler Funeral Home. Of course.  Kelli has three comedy CDs to her credit “I am NOT a 12 Year Old Boy” “Almost Pretty” and “Why Is the Fat One Always Angry” all which are on regular rotation on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio’s Rawdog Comedy Station and Pandora’s Margaret Cho Comedy Station.  Kelli was recently the expert on “What Is Normal” in Twist Magazine (known as Tiger Beat’s little sister magazine), on a page facing a full color poster of Justin Beiber. There isn’t even a ironic statement to match that, it’s just strangely true.

Janice Erlbaum is the author of GIRLBOMB: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, and HAVE YOU FOUND HER: A Memoir (both from Villard/Random House). She gave up doing readings in 2011, and D!C!W! is the only exception she’s made, because D!C!W! is awesome.

Drunken! Careening! Writers! is a reading series based on the proposition that all readings should be by: 1) Good Writers; 2) Who read their work well; 3) Something in it makes people laugh (nervous laughter counts). And 15 minutes tops.

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

Kit Reed has two new books this season: Son of Destruction, her spontaneous human combustion novel, and a “best of” collection from the Wesleyan University Press: The Story Until Now-- A Great Big Book of Stories, 35 short stories ranging from her first published short story to six new and previously uncollected stories from the 2000. Her collection, What Wolves Know, was a 2011 Shirley Jackson Award nominee

and

Daniel A. Rabuzzi is the author of The Longing For Yount series: The Choir Boats and The Indigo Pheasant.  His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil’s Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade’s Bequest. 

How do we stay true to authentic, in-depth and original storytelling in a 140 character world?

Come exchange ideas with “niche-fillers” across the publishing spectrum who have carved out a new media approach to old school storytelling — and sharing. They’ll talk about how they’ve created space for stories that matter, and then, in the literary salon tradition, we’ll engage in a lively (and perhaps libation-fueled) conversation about how you - writers, journalists, authors, and poets - can find your niche, too.

Featured guests:

Michael Shapiro, Journalist, Columbia Professor & Founder of The Big Roundtable

Rob Spillman, Editor, Tin House magazine

Halimah Marcus, Co-Editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading

Noah Rosenberg, Founder, CEO & Editor-in-Chief of Narratively

Cynthia-Marie O’Brien, Founder and Co-Managing Editor of Hypothetical: A Review Of Everything Imaginable

Syreeta McFadden, member of the LouderArts Project, Editor of Union Station Magazine, and Feministing Contributor

DAVID KINLOCH was born in Glasgow in 1959 and educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities. For many years a teacher of French language and literature, he now teaches creative writing and Scottish literature in the English Studies Department of the University of Strathclyde. His publications include five books of poetry, Dustie-Fute (Vennel Press, 1992), Paris-Forfar (Polygon, 1994), Un Tour d’Ecosse (Carcanet, 2001) and In My Father’s House (Carcanet, 2005), and Finger of a Frenchman (Carcanet, 2011).  A recipient of the 2004 Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award, he has held a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary.

SARAH ARVIO, a poet and translator, has lived in New York, Rome, Paris, Caracas and Mexico City; for many years, she has translated for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland.  Her books of poetry, all out from Knopf, are Visits from the Seventh (2002) Sono: cantos (2006), and the recently published night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, a hybrid work that is also a memoir and an essay on dreaming and psychoanalysis. She is now working on translations of poets from Spanish, French and Italian.  Several of those translations appeared in the FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry (2012).  She lives in Maryland by the Chesapeake Bay.

Last reading of the series before hiatus.

Ken Kalfus is the author of two novels, The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2003) and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and has appeared in several foreign editions, including French and Italian translations. He has also published two collections of stories, Thirst (1998) and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (1999), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Kalfus recently received a Pew Fellowships in the Arts award and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He’s written for Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times.  A film adaptation of his short story, “Pu-239,” aired on HBO in 2007. He reads from his new novel Equilateral

Kalfus was born in New York, grew up in Plainview, Long Island, and has lived in Paris, Dublin, Belgrade and Moscow. He currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron.

“Kalfus has a demonic imagination.  The glamour of consistent disaster is recognizable in every line, every scene, every lacquered articulation: it is what we moderns like to call a neo-classical construct.  I’m overcome by the splendor of what he’s done.” —Richard Howard

“When a new Ken Kalfus novel appears I stop eating, drinking, shaving, and breathing until I finish it. Equilateral is one of his smartest and most ambitious books yet. It left me thinking and wondering well past my bedtime.” —Gary Shteyngart
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Douglas Watson’s debut collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize and will be published by BOA on May 14. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Ecotone, Fifty-two Stories, Tin House Flash Fridays, and other publications. His story “Life on the Moon” was chosen by Dan Chaon and Wigleaf in 2012 as one of the year’s 50 best very short fictions. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State and an MA in history from Brown. He lives in Brooklyn and works at Time magazine.

“Herein find fiction full of whimsy, wit, hurt, and terror. Wicked, as in wickedly funny, is in the mix, too, along with a prose style both seductive and sly. Any one of Douglas Watson’s first collection of stories, The Era of Not Quite, can mend a broken world.” —Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends and finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Special Greenpoint Press Reading

MARK GOLDBLATT is the author of four novels, Africa Speaks (Permanent Press 2002), Sloth (Greenpoint Press 2010), The Unrequited (Five Star/Cengage 2013) and Twerp (Random House 2013), and one book of political commentary, Bumper Sticker Liberalism (HarperCollins 2012). He teaches writing and religious history at Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York.

_________________

Patty Dann is the author of two previous novels, SWEET & CRAZY and MERMAIDS. She has published two memoirs, THE GOLDFISH WENT ON VACATION: A MEMOIR OF LOSS and THE BABY BOAT: A MEMOIR OF ADOPTION.  Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. MERMAIDS was made into a movie, starring Cher, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci.

She has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Oregon. Dann has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the West Side YMCA. She was cited by New York Magazine as one of the “Great Teachers of NYC.”

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Linda Wolfe is an award-winning journalist and novelist.  Her books include the novel, Private Practices, and the non-fiction boos, Wasted: The Preppie Murder, The Professor and the Prostitute, and The Murder of Dr. Chapman.  A longtime contributing editor at New York magazine, Wolfe’s articles and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy and many other publications.  My Daughter, Myself, published by Greenpoint Press, is her first memoir.

Matt de la Peña is the author of four critically acclaimed young adult novels: Ball Don’t Lie, Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here, and I Will Save You.  He’s also the author of the award-winning picture book, A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis (illustrated by Kadir Nelson).  He received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific where he attended school on a full basketball scholarship.  He teaches creative writing and visits high schools and colleges throughout the country.

Lisa Ko has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Van Lier Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as residencies from Ledig House, the Saltonstall Foundation, and the Anderson Center.  Her fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Narrative, Brooklyn Review, The Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere.  She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the City College of New York and is completing a novel, Jackpot.

Lauren Mechling is a features editor at The Wall Street Journal and writes a column for medium.com.  She has written or co-written six young-adult books, the most recent of which, My Darklyng, ran as a serialized novel on Slate.com.  She recently published a young-adult short story in Rookie magazine and she is at work on a new young-adult novel.

More
www.oneteenstory.com
One Teen Story is a literary magazine for young adult readers of every age.  Each issue features one amazing short story about the teen experience.  One Teen Story is published by One Story, Inc., a nonprofit organization that publishes One Story, the award-winning publication that features the best of today’s literary short fiction.

ww.behindthebook.org
The Behind the Book Reading Series supports the literacy nonprofit organization, Behind the Book, which gets kids excited about reading by connecting them with contemporary writers and illustrators.  Working with low-income students in the 1st-12th grades, Behind the Book brings authors and their books into individual classrooms to build a new generation of readers and writers.  Since our founding in 2003, we have worked with 5,400 students and put over 12,000 books in students’ hands and on library shelves.

Gary J. Whitehead has authored three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is A Glossary of Chickens, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton University Press Contemporary Poets Series. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program the Writer’s Almanac. He has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Whitehead teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn in 1957, but didn’t ascend to residency there until 1987, after living stints in Long Island, Manhattan and Houston, TX. She is a winner of the Nation’s Discovery Award, PEN’s Emerging Writer Award and the Gerald Cable Prize for her first book, Inventing Difficulty. Her second book, The Two Yvonnes, came out from Princeton’s Contemporary Poets Series . She is the poetry editor for the annual upstreet and lives, with her family, in Ft. Greene, where she takes advantage of foot traffic going to the Brooklyn Flea to raise money for girls’ and women’s civil rights issues in the third world.

Anthony Carelli was raised in Poynette, Wisconsin and studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and New York University. In 2011 he was awarded a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. His poems have appeared in various magazines, including the New Yorker. His first book of poems, Carnations (Princeton, 2011), was named a finalist for the 2011 Levis Reading Prize. Anthony lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches expository writing at New York University.

Doll Parts is NYC’s premier Dolly Parton cover band, featuring Maggie Robinson, Kate Marvin and Julia Sirna-Frest. Learn more at www.dollpartsband.com.

Susana H. Case’s chapbooks include The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press), which was re-released in a full-length Polish-English annotated version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Opole University Press. Her books are: Salem In Séance (WordTech Editions) and Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press). Her next book, 4 Rms w Vu is forthcoming from Mayapple Press.

Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of the anthology, Villanelles (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2012). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Poet Lore, and RATTLE, among others. For more information please visit www.memali.com

Elayne Safir (emptyminute.com), cover designer for Women Write Resistance, is an artist and a photographer, walking the fine ink line between the truly fantastical and the contemporary with a touch of magic realism. Her art has appeared on and in books, music albums, t-shirts, films, tattoos, and galleries in Canada and the United States.

Larissa Shmailo is a poet and translator whose books are In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence; her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism. Her translation of Alexei Kruchenych’s Victory over the Sun is archived at the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum. She blogs at http://larissashmailo.blogspot.com.

Margo Taft Stever’s chapbook, The Hudson Line, was published by Main Street Rag (2012). Her book, Frozen Spring (2002), won the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Reading the Night Sky, won the 1996 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition. She is the founder of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and the founding editor of Slapering Hol Press.

Alison Stone is the author of From the Fool to the World (Parallel Press) and They Sing at Midnight (Many Mountains Moving). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares. Winner of Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award, she is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. 

Amber West’s writing has appeared in Calyx, Puppetry International, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Poetry at NYU, and is a doctoral candidate at UConn. Her plays and “puppet poems” have been performed in SF and NYC. She’s co-founder of Alphabet Arts and director of the annual Puppets & Poets festival at The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn (alphabetarts.org).

LOUIS JENKINS is the author of Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005.  Other books include An Almost Human Gesture (Eighties Press and Ally Press, 1987), All Tangled Up With the Living (Nineties Press, 1991), Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1995), winner of the Minnesota Book Award, Just Above Water (Holy Cow! Press, 1997) and The Winter Road (Holy Cow! Press, 2000).  One of the American masters of the prose poem, his work has been included in Great American Prose Poems, The Best American Poetry 1999, and a variety of journals and magazines.  He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

GLYN MAXWELL is a British poet, playwright, and librettist.  Recent collections of poetry include The Nerve (2002), winner of the Geoffrey Haber Memorial Prize, The Sugar Mile (2005) and Hide Now (2008), which was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2008 and the Forward Prize in 2009.  His three earliest collections of poetry, Tale Of The Mayor’s Son (1990), Out of the Rain (1992), Rest For The Wicked (1995) are collected as The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (2000).  Maxwell was born and raised in Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire.  Over fifteen of his plays have been produced in both America and the UK, and he’s taught extensively on both sides of the pond.  He lives in London and lectures currently at the University of Essex. 

Steph Cha, a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, lives in her native city of Los Angeles. She reads from her debut novel: FOLLOW HER HOME
“Stephanie Cha’s brilliant debut is as Noir as Old Nick’s sense of humour. Compelling from first to last page, she takes on contemporary
L.A., sweeping the reader through Chandler’s twilight, heartbroken city from mansions to faux K-town hostess bars. L.A. Noir at its finest.”

--DENISE MINA, THE DEAD HOUR

Daniel Friedman is a graduate of the University of Maryland and NYU School of Law. He lives in New York City. Daniel Friedman reads from his novel: Don’t Ever Get Old.
“A knockout...In prose as straightforward and tough as old Buck, the plot reveals its secrets with perfect timing.” Booklist (starred review)
When Buck Schatz, senior citizen and retired Memphis cop, learns that an old adversary may have escaped Germany with a fortune in stolen gold, Buck decides to hunt down the fugitive and claim the loot. But a lot of people want a piece of the stolen treasure, and Buck’s investigation quickly attracts unfriendly attention from a very motley (and murderous) crew.

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

David Blistein, author of Davids Inferno, is a novelist, essayist, and former advertising agency executive whose writing is the culmination of a lifelong pursuit of wisdom, transcendence, and humor. His works-in-progress include books and blogs that present unconventional perspectives on nature, psychology, spirituality and writing.

He lives with his wife, Wendy O’Connell, in Southern Vermont. For more information, see www.davidblistein.com.

DAVID’S INFERNO, the authors description:
While centered around a breakdown that I had between 2005-2007, David’s Inferno also includes informative (and, I hope, amusing) explanations of diagnoses, clinical trials, prescription drugs, and alternative medicine; as well as my reflections on depression’s effects on relationship, creativity, and spirituality. With a few riffs on Dante thrown in for good measure. Yes, there is a good bit of memoir in there but it’s not as depressing as you might think…”
— David Blistein

Advance Praise:
Blistein’s book is a searingly honest and deeply researched account of a mysterious and pervasive illness. He takes us into the heart of his Inferno, combing through the clinical and scientific literature and plumbing personal testimonies to create a vivid, unforgettable image of this very personal form of hell. This is a wonderful and important book.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize Winning author ofThe Emperor of All Maladies.

A virtual “Fodor’s Guide” to the troubled soul.
— J.C. Hallman, author of Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between William and Henry James.

“Warm and compassionate, often hilarious, and full of hope and encouragement…If you love someone who is depressed (or who you think might be), read this book.”
—Caroline Carr, author of Living with Depression: How to Cope When Your Partner is Depressed

This record of a writing life, a talented man’s self-examination, a marriage, all enduring the scalding tides those beset by depression know, stands out particularly for its articulated wisdom and graceful prose…David’s Inferno, with its thoughtfulness and wit, is a gift to be cherished. 
— Robert Stone
Winner of the National Book Award
Pulitzer Prize Nominee

Adam O. Davis lives in San Diego, California, where he teaches English literature & creative writing at The Bishop’s School. His work has been published in many journals, including Boston Review, Sixth Finch, and The Paris Review. His manuscript, Index of Haunted Houses, has been shortlisted for publication by Barrow Street, Tupelo Press, and Salt Publishing. A previous finalist for the California Writers Exchange, this summer he’ll be a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.

Sean Madigan Hoen’s fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including BOMB Magazine, where he was awarded their 2011 Fiction Prize.  His first book, Songs Only You Know, is forthcoming from SoHo Press in 2014. He’s taught writing at Columbia and Western Michigan University, and was raised in Dearborn, Michigan. 

Vivien Drabkin is the Middle School English Department Chair at Rodeph Sholom School on the Upper West Side. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she has now lived in New York for almost ten years. Vivien enjoys teaching students how to write and is especially pleased when eighth graders laugh at her jokes--they are a tough audience.

Your host this month is Bryan VanDyke

What is Columbia Selects?  The first Thursday of each month the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series featuring Writing Program alumni. These fresh talents are finished with or near to finished with their first books, but do not yet have a book contract and/or an agent. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success. This is your chance to glimpse who you’ll be reading in 2014!

Columbia Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke and Emily Austin.

SIDEKICK by E.P. Henderson

FRIENDS WITHOUT BENEFITS by Vito Racanelli

EL BANDITO by Michael G. McLaughlin

HEART OF A GOD by Sam Carter

WILHELM DAVID by Jerry Sticker

Liars’ League NYC is a monthly live literary journal featuring professional actors reading original short stories by both up-and-coming and well-established writers. Selected stories are read live, published online, recorded for download, and available for free in the iTunes Store. Each Liars’ League NYC show is themed - if you’re interested in either submitting or reading a story, please see www.liarsleaguenyc.com for full details. Hosted by Andrew Lloyd-Jones and Liars’ League NYC.

MICHAEL KLEIN’s books of poetry include then, we were still living, Track Conditions, The End of Being Known, and 1990, which tied with James Schuyler for the 1993 Lambda Literary Award.  He has also edited Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, winner of the Lambda Book Award), Things Shaped in Passing, and In the Company of My Solitude. His new book of poems, The Talking Day, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013. He teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington and is on the faculty of the summer program at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

WILL SCHUTT’s first manuscript, Westerly, was chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2012 Yale Younger Prize.  The book is forthcoming in April, 2013 from Yale University Press.  Schutt’s poems and translations have appeared in Agni, FIELD, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.  A graduate of Oberlin College and Hollins University, he lives with his wife in Wainscott, New York.

Thomas O’Malley is the author of the novel In the Province of Saints, selected as one of the best books of 2005 by Booklist and the New York Public Library. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and teaches at Dartmouth College. Raised in Ireland and England, O’Malley currently lives in the Boston area. He reads from his novel: This Magnificent Desolation

“A beautiful, floating novel. Thomas O’Malley writes with grace and style and bravery. There is not an ounce of cynicism here. While most of us remain earthbound, O’Malley allows us to believe that we can, at various times, go to an imaginative elsewhere. Even the desolation can have its own magnificence. O’Malley is a great talent, reminiscent of another fine Irish writer, Sebastian Barry.”—Colum McCann

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Patrick McGrath is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Asylum, Martha Peake, Port Mungo, Trauma, and Spider. Three of his novels have been adapted into films, including David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), for which McGrath wrote the screenplay. Born in London, McGrath lives in New York. He reads from his novel: Constance
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“Patrick McGrath is one of the age’s most elegantly accomplished divers into the human psyche, and in his new novel he brings us another resonant sounding from that deep well. Constance is an intricate, multi-layered and, in the end, surprisingly tender work from a master writer.”—John Banville

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Join us Friday April 26th as Paragraph Members Bonnie Altucher, Roberta Lawrence and Caroline Rothstein share their work at KGB Bar.

Bonnie Altucher grew up in New York City and received an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. Her poetry was published in Roof Magazine, and she has been awarded residency fellowships in fiction from Ucross, Ragdale, VCCA and MacDowell. In 1998 she founded and edited Documentmag, an online journal about documentary filmmaking. She has reviewed books for Electric Literature’s The Outlet and is finishing Autonomy, a novel about a psychotherapy cult in New York in the 60’s and 80’s.

Roberta Lawrence is a singer/songwriter whose songs expanded into short stories and novels. Her novel-in-progress, Quietly Crazy for You, was inspired by the years she spent in the parallel universe of jazz and studio musician. Her short story collection is entitled The Velocity of Grief and chronicles a young widow’s struggles to build a new life. Roberta has won a New Voices Award from the Writer’s Voice, a Ludwig Vogelstein Fiction grant, and residencies at Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her articles and reviews have appeared in BOMB, Musician, and ASCAP in Action. She helms her marketing and PR firm, Roberta Lawrence Media. As a songwriter, singer and record producer, she has worked with Richie Havens, Bob James, Herbie Hancock and Donald Harrison. Her CD with trumpeter Mike Lawrence, “Nightwind,” topped the Billboard charts. She is currently working on her own CD, to be released in December 2013.

Caroline Rothstein is a New York City-based writer, performer, and eating disorder recovery advocate. She was a member of the 2010 Nuyorican Poets Café slam team, and her award-winning autobiographical one-woman play “faith” debuted in Culture Project’s Women Center Stage 2012 Festival. Her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, xoJane, Big Think, The Jewish Daily Forward, Narratively, and elsewhere. She hosts the widely viewed YouTube video-blog “Body Empowerment,” sharing her own recovery story to promote positive body image worldwide. She has a B.A. in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Sirius XM, WNYC, Manhattan Monologue Slam Champ) invites some of NY’s top writers and storytellers to share true, bizarre tales about their lives. There’s live accordion music, a challenging trivia game, and a free wine giveaway where one lucky audience member will walk away with their very own bottle of Sideshow Sauce! Tonight’s stellar lineup features:

Blaise Allysen Kearsley (How I Learned reading series)

Robin Gelfenbien (Yum’s the Word, Huffington Post)

Aaron Wolfe (The Moth)

* Time Out NY “Critics’ Pick”
* NY Daily News “Editor’s Pick”

* “a well-programmed night” - The New York Times

MICHAEL DICKMAN is the author of The End of the West (Copper Canyon, 2009), Flies (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award for the most outstanding second book by an American poet, and 50 American Plays, which he co-wrote with his brother, the poet Matthew Dickman.  Dickman has received fellowships from the Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Princeton University. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and, alongside his brother, in The New Yorker.

SHARON OLDS is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (Knopf) The Father (Knopf), Satan Says, and The Dead and the Living (Knopf), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her most recent volume, Stag’s Leap (Knopf), was awarded the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.  In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.  Olds declined.  Her open letter, published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation, closed as follows: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

This Week: Tin House celebrates the Spring Issue #55: This Means War

Readings from contributors: Michael Helm, Karen Russell and Colum McCann.

The earliest recorded stories are war stories. Some forty thousand years ago, people painted their tales of hunting buffalo and elk and battling fellow humans on the walls of caves. As soon as we could put pen to paper, we recorded for posterity how armies crossed seas and mountains and deserts to clash swords with other men, for glory and in memory of the fallen. We may have forgotten how our great-great-grandparents met and fell in love, but we remember that our great-great-grandpa fought at the battle of Normandy. Everyone has a war story. Why? Because war equals conflict and conflict equals story. It has always fallen to our storytellers, poets, and reporters to show us who we are and help us make sense of the senseless. So it has been, so it will always be.
Rob Spillman – Editor, Tin House

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Merlin Ural was born in Bulgaria and raised in Turkey, where her short stories and a short film script received awards and were published. Her work was also published in Ping Pong and Warscapes. She is an MFA candidate in the Fiction Writing Program at the New School. She lives in New York.

Jackson Taylor is the author of the novel The Blue Orchard, and he directs the newly launched Writer’s Foundry MFA at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn.  He also directs the Prison Writing Program at P.E.N., where he co-edited and co-wrote the program’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. His poems have recently appeared in Letters: The Journal from Yale Institute of Sacred Music; Barrow Street; and the two-volume collection Still Against War.

Rick Rofihe is the author of Father Must, a collection of short stories published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, Open City, Swink, Unsaid, and on epiphanyzine, slushpilemag, and fictionaut. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, SPY, and The East Hampton Star, and on mrbellersneighborhood. A recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, he has taught MFA writing at Columbia University. He currently teaches privately in New York City, and was an advisor to the Vilcek Foundation for their 2011 prizes in the field of literature. Rick is the Judge of the annual Open City Magazine RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest and is Editor of the online literary journal Anderbo.

Chelsea Reilly is an MFA candidate at The New School. Her poetry has been featured on the Best American Poetry blog. She enjoys sparkly things, sandwiches, and resting. She hopes to own many cats one day.

Richard Peabody is a French toast addict and native Washingtonian. He has two new books out—a book of poetry, Speed Enforced by Aircraft (Broadkill River Press), and a book of short stories Blue Suburban Skies (Main Street Rag Press). He won the Beyond the Margins “Above & Beyond Award” for 2013.  He has edited Gargoyle Magazine since back before Elvis died.

Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.

Roberto Montes’s first book of poems, I Don’t Know Do You, is forthcoming from Ampersand Books in 2014, and his chapbook, How to Be Sincere in Your Poetry Workshop, will be out this Fall from NAP. His work has appeared in the 2011 Best of the Net Anthology; Forklift, Ohio; Sixth Finch; Vinyl Poetry; and elsewhere. God bless.

Sean M. Damlos-Mitchell is just a soul whose intentions are good—he comes from Arizona, is currently pursuing his MFA in poetry at The New School, and lives in Brooklyn.

Micah Ling earned her MFA in poetry at Indiana University. She currently teaches in the English department at Fordham University in Manhattan. She has three collections of poetry: Three Islands, Sweetgrass, and Settlement.

Susan Lewis’s collection of prose poems, How to Be Another, will be available in June, 2013 from Červená Barva Press. Her chapbooks are The Following Message (White Knuckle Press, 2013), At Times Your Lines (Argotist e-books, 2012), Some Assembly Required (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Commodity Fetishism, winner of the 2009 Červená Barva Press Chapbook Award, and Animal Husbandry (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Susan’s work has been published in a great number of journals and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boog City, Cimarron Review, Fact-Simile, Fourteen Hills, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, On Barcelona, Otoliths, Pool, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, So To Speak, Sycamore Review, Truck, Verse (online), and Verse Daily. She is Managing Editor of MadHat Press, MadHat Lit, and MadHat Annual. 

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of the chapbooks Cry Me a Lorca and Toy Storm. His poems are forthcoming or appear in Assaracus, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Bellevue Literary Review, Ducts, LaFovea, Quarterly West, and many more; as well as the anthologies Bunny Ears, Flicker & Spark, Divining Divas, My Diva, Saints of Hysteria, and others. His translations of Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, appear in Guernica, Terra Incognita, U.S. Latino Review, and Visions. In 2012 his work was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya prize. Castro lives in Astoria, Queens.

Patricia Spears Jones is author of Painkiller and Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press) and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House) and three chapbooks, most recently Swimming to America (Red Glass Books) and two plays commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines. Poems are anthologized in Angles of Ascent; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn; and Best American Poetry: 2000.  She is editor of 30 Days Hath September, blog project at www.blackearthinstitute.org; Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=2944 and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of Poetry by New York City Women and is a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine.  Recipient of awards from The Foundation of Contemporary Art and The New York Community Trust (The Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award), the Goethe Institute and grants from the NEA and NYFA. Instructor at LaGuardia Community College, Queens College, New School University (Parsons), Sarah Lawrence, Naropa University, Manhattanville College, for Poets House, Cave Canem and St. Mark’s Poetry Project.  She is serving as Mentor for Poetry Projects’s Emerge Surface Be, a new fellows program.

Amy Lemmon is the author of two poetry collections: Fine Motor and Saint Nobody and co-author, with Denise Duhamel of ABBA: The Poems and Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Court Green, The Journal, Barrow Street, and many other magazines and anthologies. Amy holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She lives with her two children in Astoria, Queens.

LYNN MELNICK’s first book of poetry is If I Should Say I Have Hope, published by YesYes books. Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, DENVER QUARTERLY, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Opium and Forklift, Ohio, and she has written essays and book reviews for Boston Review, Coldfront, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Daily, and VIDAweb, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

YONA HARVEY is a literary artist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Hemming the Water (Four Way Books: New York, 2013), and the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Her poems can be found in jubilat, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, West Branch, and various journals and anthologies, including A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry (Ed. Annie Finch). She lives with her husband and two children in Pittsburgh, PA, and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.

Blunderbuss is a new online magazine of visceral humanist literature, comics and essays. www.blunderbussmag.com

Sasha Fletcher is a long time HTML Giant contributor, an editor at The Gigantic, and the author of “When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets.” His poetry has been published in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, and Hobart. He will be reading poetry (forthcoming on Blunderbuss Magazine).

@Leyawn has like a gazillion dark internet babes on Weird Twitter Dot Biz. He will be reading twitterature.

Ian MacDougall, a former Associated Press reporter, has written for the Guardian, n+1, and The Daily, among other publications. He is a second-year student at Columbia Law School. He will be reading from his essay “The Ballad of Puerto Rican Rick.”
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Questions contact Suzanne Dottino - suzanne@kgbbar.com

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories and essays. Her work has appeared in, among others, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salt Hill, New York Quarterly, North American Review and Cream City Review. A finalist for the Iowa Review’s Award for Literary Nonfiction, she was named as Notable Reading for Best American Non-required Reading and awarded Best of the Net 2010 for fiction. Her nonfiction book Henry River Mill Village which she co-authored with 79 year-old Ruby Young Keller was published by Arcadia Press in July 2012; her first book of poems will be published by Sock Monkey Press in Spring 2014. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com.
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Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Currently he lives in Shanghai. He ran workshops at the 2013 Shanghai International Literary Festival, and he read and taught at the 2012 Philippines International Literary Festival in Manila. In May he’ll appear at the Silliman National Writers Workshop on Negros, Oriental in the Philippines. He is the fiction editor of the webzine Ducts. This year, two of his poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Recent poems and stories appear or are forthcoming in Asia Writes, Caribbean Vistas, The Dirty Napkin, Extracts, The Tule Review, and Unshod Quills.
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JAMES BRALY’s first book, Life in a Marital Institution (20 Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Memoir) will be published by St. Martin’s Press on April Fools for Love Day (April 2). He has contributed autobiographical stories to This American Life, The New York Times, and The Moth, where he is the first two-time winner of The Moth GrandSlam, and a featured performer on their national tour, podcast, radio hour, and CD collections. His Off-Broadway monologue Life in a Marital Institution (20 Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Hour) sold out 59E59 Theaters in New York City, where it was reviewed as “gaspingly funny” (Variety) and “never less than excellent” (New York Times). The show is touring the country presented by Meredith Vieira Productions, which is developing it for TV. More at http://www.JamesBraly.com.

Nell Freudenberger’s third book, The Newlyweds, recently released in paperback, was published to across-the-board praise last spring.  The Los Angeles Times called it “riveting,” and The Washing Post praised it as “A delight, one of the easiest book recommendations of the year.” She is also the author of the novel The Dissident and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Both books were New York Times Book Review Notables.  A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Kristopher Jansma buzz-worthy debut, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, is one of The Millions most-anticipated novels of 2013.  A finalist for BOMB Magazine’s 2011 fiction contest, he has been published in The Columbia Spectator, Blue Mesa Review, Opium, Shaking Literary Magazine, and The 322 Review, among others.  Flavorwire named him one of the “Up-and-Coming Culture Makers to Watch in 2013.” He received his M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia.  He is a lecturer at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase and writes a monthly column for Electric Literature’s blog The Outlet.  He lives with his wife in New York City.

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels, Skinny and Who By Fire, which The Boston Globe praised as, “Impressively executed...Spechler is a talented writer who transcends melodrama and cliché with striking sensitivity and delicate touch.” She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Slate, Nerve, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train Stories, GQ, Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Self, Details, and elsewhere.  She is also a five-time Moth StorySLAM winner and has been featured on NPR.  She received her M.F.A. degree from the University of Montana and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University and the writer-in-residence at Portsmouth Abbey School.  A 2012-2013 LABA Fellow, she teaches writing in New York City and for Stanford University’s Online Writer’s Studio.

Back to KGB by popular demand and the kind invitation of Denis Woychuk, who lifted his glass from behind the bar at the inaugural event and said, “This is our Stonewall!” Hosted by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, who know something about Stonewall.

about the talk: Ashton Applewhite is interested in why Americans are so ambivalent about the prospect of longer lives. She was too, until she learned more. It turns out that people are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. That the vast majority of Americans over 65 live independently. That older people are less depressed than the young or middle-aged. That the older people get, the less afraid they are of dying.

Why do these facts surprise so many? Because ageism - internalized and in the culture at large - obscures all but the most negative messages about life after 65 (or 50, or just aging past youth), with disastrous personal and political implications. In the 20th century, the civil rights and women’s movements raised our awareness of racism and sexism. It’s high time to do so around discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of age.  Her 40-minute talk, “This Chair Rocks”, proposes an alternative to worrying about getting old: wake up to the ageist messages that frame two thirds of our lives as decline, cheer up, and push back.

about the speaker: Ashton is the voice of Yo, Is This Ageist and has been writing about aging and ageism since 2007 at This Chair Rocks.  During this time, she’s become a Knight Fellow, a New York Times Fellow, and a Columbia Journalism School Age Boom Fellow. She is the author of Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, media liaison to the board of the Council on Contemporary Families, and a staff writer at the American Museum of Natural History.

MAJOR JACKSON’s books of poems are Holding Company (2010, Norton) and Hoops (2006, Norton), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press), which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.  Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

HEATHER CHRISTLE is the author of What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and has also taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat, the coordinator of the Royal Society of Hadley for Improving Natural Knowledge at Flying Object, and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Brian McGreevy is the author of Hemlock Grove as well as executive producer of the forthcoming Netflix Original Series of the same name.  As a screenwriter and producer he has projects in development with Warner Bros, Voltage Pictures, and Shinebox SMC, of which he is also a partner.  He holds an MFA from the James A Michener for Writers.

“It takes a rare stroke of genius to reconfigure the gothic novel within the postindustrial barrens of steel country, and another entirely to upstage this conceit with a mythic and ambitious story of adolescence and alienation. Like a collaboration between Edgar Allan Poe and J. D. Salinger, this is a real emerging talent.” —Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust

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Terese Svoboda, a native of Nebraska is the author of five volumes of poetry and four novels, including Bohemian Girl, a collection of Short Stories Trailer Girl and other Stories. A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan, winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize; and a New York Times Book Review Writers’ Choice selection, Cleaned the Crocodile’s Teeth, translated from the Nuer, the language of a South Sudanese people, many of whom have settled in Nebraska. She reads from her novel Tin God .
“Tin God is Brutal and beautiful book about being lost in new worlds and old ones, too. Terese Svoboda has once again proven herself a writer of real power and mystery.” Sam Lipsyte

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 60 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies. She has received an O. Henry award, been shortlisted for a Pushcart prize, for the Iowa short fiction award, the Bellwether award and the Shirley Jackson award for short fiction. Her third novel, Glorious Plague, will be published by Permuted Press in 2014. Her second short-story collection, The Inner City, was just published by ChiZine Publications in Feb. 2013.

Chandler Klang Smith is a graduate of Bennington College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she received a Writing Fellowship. She lives in New York City and works in publishing. Goldenland Past Dark (ChiZine Publications, 2013) is her first novel.  Learn more about her on the web at www.chandlerklangsmith.com.

Andrei Guruianu lives in New York City where he teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is the author of a memoir and four collections of poetry. In the past he has served as editor and publisher of the literary journal The Broome Review and guest editor of the internationally distributed magazine Yellow Medicine Review. In 2009 and 2010 he served as the Broome County, NY poet laureate. His first collection of short stories will be published later this year. More at www.andreiguruianu.com.

Dawn Leas‘s chapbook, I Know When to Keep Quiet, was released in 2010 by Finishing Line Press. She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. Her work has appeared in goldwakepress.org, Literary Mama, Willows Wept Review, Interstice, and elsewhere. In past lives she was a copywriter, freelancer, admissions director and middle-school English teacher. Currently, she is the associate director of the Wilkes University M.A./M.F.A. Creative Writing program and is also a contributing editor for Poets’ Quarterly. For more information, please visit www.dawnleas.com.

Hope Tarr is the award-winning author of twenty historical and contemporary romances for multiple publishers – Berkley/Jove, Harlequin, and most recently, her Suddenly Cinderella Series of contemporary fairytale-themed romances for Entangled Publishing. Hope is also a co-founder and current principal of Lady Jane’s Salon™, New York City’s first and so far only monthly romance fiction reading series now with satellites in four other U.S. cities. Connect with Hope online: www.hopetarr.com; @HopeTarr; facebook.com/HopeC.Tarr: and goodreads.com/author/show/254454.Hope_Tarr.

Dawn D’Aries has dabbled in journalism and public relations for most of her adult life. She is in the process of morphing into a creative writer and adjunct college instructor. Her one-act play Contemporary Saintsrecently was staged in Scranton as part of the Jason Miller Playwrights’ Project, and her nonfiction essay Distant Relatives received an honorable mention in a contest sponsored by Hippocampus magazine.

Our line-up this month:

Jared White is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Yellowcake and This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me. A third chapbook, My Former Politics, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in Harp & Altar, Sink Review, and We Are So Happy To Know Something. With his wife Farah Field, Jared owns a small press bookstore, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, co-curates an event series, Yardmeter Editions, and is raising a baby named Roman.

Gail Dottin was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholar in Panama and a Dean’s Nonfiction Fellow at Columbia. She is the co-founder of Our Word at Columbia’s School of the Arts, an organization for artists of color. Her first book, Where There Is Pride In Belonging, a memoir about her grandfather’s work on the building of the Panamá Canal, is near completion. Two of her essays will appear in upcoming anthologies: Wise Latina, by Univ. of Nebraska Press, and Dismantle, coming this summer by Thread Makes Blanket.

Laura Juliet Wood lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where she teaches, translates and is associate editor at SOL Magazine.  Her poems appear in numerous journals, including The Los Angeles Review, The Atlanta Review and The Hollins Critic. In March, 2012 she was named one of two finalists in AROHO’s Orlando Poetry prize. She is author of All Hands Lost, published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press.

Your host this month is Jessamine Chan.

What is Columbia Selects?  The first Thursday of each month (except for January, when Wednesday prevails) the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series featuring Writing Program alumni. These fresh talents are finished with or near to finished with their first books, but do not yet have a book contract and/or an agent. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success. This is your chance to glimpse who you’ll be reading in 2014!

Liars’ League NYC is a monthly live literary journal featuring professional actors reading original short stories by both up-and-coming and well-established writers. Selected stories are read live, published online, recorded for download, and available for free in the iTunes Store. Each Liars’ League NYC show is themed - if you’re interested in either submitting or reading a story, please see www.liarsleaguenyc.com for full details. Hosted by Andrew Lloyd-Jones and Liars’ League NYC.

NATE PRITTS is the author of four books of poems - most recently Big Bright Sun (BlazeVOX), The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books), and Sweet Nothing (Lowbrow Press). His poetry has appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among many others. His reviews & critical prose appear regularly in Rain Taxi Review of Books, Boston Review & Coldfront. Nate has his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and PhD in British Romanticism from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N & H_NGM_N BKS, an online journal & small press. He lives in Syracuse, New York.

JENNIFER FORTIN’s first book, Mined Muzzle Velocity, was published by Lowbrow Press in 2011. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Court Green, Copper Nickel, BlazeVOX, Zoland Poetry, H_NGM_N, Action, Yes, LIT, GlitterPony, TYPO, and elsewhere. Dancing Girl Press has recently published her chapbook, If Made Into a Law, another chapbook, Nicole C. (Apartment 4), was published as part of the Dusie Kollektiv in 2011.  With three other poets, she founded and edits the online poetry journal LEVELER.  She was a Finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship.

JACKIE CLARK’s first book of poems is Aphoria, from Brooklyn Arts Press.  She is also the author of three chapbooks, I Live Here Now (Lame House Press), Red Fortress (H_NGM_N) and Office Work (Greying Ghost).  The series editor of Poets off Poetry on Coldfront, a monthly series where poets write about music, she has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. She lives in Jersey City and can be found online at http://nohelpforthat.com

Easter Sunday Comix Night at the KGB Bar
Hosted by Robyn Chapman

Sam Henderson has been self-publishing Xeroxed minicomics since 1980. In 1993 he began self-publishing his best-known title, The Magic Whistle. Also in 1993 he began the wordless comic strip “Scene but Not Heard” in Nickelodeon Magazine. It was the magazine’s longest-running comic strip. In 2003, Sam’s writing and storyboard directing work on SpongeBob SquarePants earned him a nomination for Best Animated Program (for programming less than one hour) in the 55th Emmy Awards.
www.themagicwhistle.blogspot.com

Star Fruit is Gretta Johnson’s first book.  She is a visual artist living in New York and for the past three years has worked as a chocolatier’s assistant and personal comic book illustrator to Sebastian Brecht. She has taught and continues to teach drawing and sculpture classes at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in Manhattan.
http://www.grettajohnson.com

Caroline Paquita runs Pegacorn Press, a feminist, queer, and “total-art-freaker” publishing house that specializes in producing small-run art books, zines, and comics. So far, nine official publications have been released since the fall of 2011, including Caroline’s comic Womanimalistic. Caroline has also published comics by other authors, such as FUTURE TENSE, Late Era Clash #24, FAG SCHOOL #4, Burn Collector #16, and Those Fucking Unicorns.
www.carolinepaquita.com

Jesse Reklaw is the author of the comic strip “Slow Wave,” which ran in multiple papers from 1995 to 2011 and was collected into the books Dreamtoons and The Night of Your Life. He is also the author of Applicant, a hilarious collection of discarded college applicant documents. He kept a daily comic diary from 2007-2008 called Ten Thousand Things To Do. In 2013 LOVF, a full-color collection of his sketchbook comics, will be published. He lives in Portland, Oregon where he taught at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in their Comics Program.
www.slowwave.com

Karl Stevens’ first book, Guilty, was published in 2004 with a grant from the Xeric Foundation. His comic strips “Whatever,” “Succe$$” (with writer Gustavo Turner), and Failure ran in the Boston Phoenix. As an illustrator, Karl collaborated with Anthony Apesos on the book Anatomy for Artists: A New Approach Discovering, Learning, and Remembering the Body. His oil paintings and watercolors, predominantly portraits, have been exhibited at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.
www.karlstevensart.com

Lauren Weinstein is a cartoonist who is still recovering from having a baby and moving to the suburbs of New Jersey (it’s been two years).  Her comics books include Girl Stories and The Goddess of War, and her work has been published in Kramer’s Ergot, The Ganzfeld, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, and The Best American Comics of 2007 and 2010.  Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, and Heeb magazines.  She is currently working on a sequel to Girl Stories.
www.laurenweinstein.com

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.