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.

An Evening with Coffee House Press Authors

Ben Lerner reads from his novel: Leaving the Atocha Station

Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages, and Rain Taxi, and he has released three albums under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, is a companion album to this novel and will be released in May 2012. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and his son, Jackson.

“Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing, and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit. Dylan Hicks knows his music and his prose is a song in itself. He’s given light to the shuttered and boarded parts of life.” —S A M L I P S Y T E
“As a novel, Dylan Hicks’s Boarded Windows takes a sly, questioning, sidelong glance that keeps both the narrator and his listeners—because this novel is whispered, confided, mused, as much as it is written—continually off balance. As a work of American iconography, it ’s a continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man.”—GR E I L MA R C US
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Brian Evenson reads from his collection: Windye
Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York’s Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellow- ship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for “ Windeye,” Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Department.
“Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.” —J ONATHAN L ETHEM
“Laughter can be an effective tool of the horror writer, and Evenson is its finest practitioner.” —TIME OUT CHICAGO

“A backwoods Bret Easton Ellis.”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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.

Matt Hart is a co-founder and editor of Forklift Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Butcher Shop, The Canary, and Ploughshares, among other journals, and can be seen in such online journals as Diagram, H_NGM_N, and Typo. A chapbook of his work, Revelated, was just published this Fall by Hollyridge Press. His first full-length book of poems, Who’s Who Vivid, is forthcoming from Slope Editions. He teaches writing and aesthetics at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Macgregor Card is a poet, translator and bibliographer living in Jackson Heights, NYC. His first collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, was the winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poet Series. A new chapbook, The Archers, is forthcoming from Song Cave. With Andrew Maxwell he was co-editor of The Germ: A Journal of Poetic Research, from 1997-2005. He teaches poetry at Pratt Institute and is an associate editor of the MLA International Bibliography.

David Rees: Artisinal Pencil Sharpening

Rebecca Lindenberg’s first book of poems, LOVE: AN INDEX, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s Books in March 2012. Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in POETRY, The Believer, Iowa Review, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, No Tell Motel, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. She enjoys (among other things) a good rye Manhattan, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, new snow, and her growing menagerie of pets.

Neil Shepard has two new books: a full book of poems, (T)ravel/Un(t)ravel (Mid-List Press, 2011), and an offbeat chapbook, Vermont Exit Ramps (Pudding House Press, 2012). His three previous books of poetry are Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat (Mid-List Press, 1993), I’m Here Because I Lost My Way (Mid-List Press, 1998) and This Far from the Source (Mid-List Press, 2006), which was an “Editor’s Choice” at Notre Dame Review and a “Pick of the Month” from Small Press Reviews. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Boulevard, Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review and Ploughshares. He founded and directed the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center, and he taught for several decades in the BFA Creative Writing Program at Johnson State College in Vermont until his retirement in 2009. He presently lives in New York City and teaches poetry workshops at The Poets House. Outside of the literary realm, Neil is a founding member of the jazz-poetry group POJAZZ.

Elizabeth Powell’s first book of poems, The Republic of Self, won the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Post Road, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. Her essay “Infidelities” appeared in My Mother Married Your Father, an anthology of essays on step-families, published by WW Norton. She teaches at the University of Vermont, and is poetry editor of Green Mountains Review.

Ted Dodson is the founding editor and curator of On the Escape, a filmed journal, a curator for the Triptych Reading Series, and is an editor and the special projects coordinator for Futurepoem. Select publication can be found in TIM, Coldfront, Well Greased, la fovea, The Image Project, Onesies, and Interrobang. He is from Middleburg, VA and currently resides in Brooklyn.

Krystal Languell is the author of the poetry collection, Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011), which was also a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and DIAGRAM among other journals, and was anthologized in the 2010 edition of Best of the Web. Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as editor-in-chief for Noemi Press and a collaborative board member for Belladonna* Series.

Camilo Roldán is a poet and translator living in New York City and co-curates the monthly Triptych Reading Series at The 11th Street Bar in Manhattan. He is the author of a chapbook of translations, Amílkar U., Nadaísta in Translation (These Signals Press, 2011) and his poems have appeared in various journals, including Leveler, Lungfull! and Pank.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010), three poetry collections—Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) and Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009)—and three poetry chapbooks. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she now teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and Ashland University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.

Laura Cronk’s first book of poems, Having Been an Accomplice, won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and is forthcoming from Persea Books.  Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Barrow Street, Ecotone, WSQ, McSweeney’s, The Best American Poetry, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel.  She is currently on the faculty of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing for Democracy at The New School.

Marie Ponsot has published numerous poetry collections, including Easy (2009), Springing (2002), The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Green Dark (1988), Admit Impediment (1981), and True Minds (1957). Ponsot, who also translates books from the French, has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University and New York University. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

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.

Melissa Broder is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart (Publishing Genius, 2012) and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, 2010). Poems appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Redivider, Court Green, The Missouri Review online, Barrelhouse, The Awl, and Drunken Boat. She edits La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop in NYC. By day, she is a publicity manager at Penguin. Broder received her BA from Tufts University and is getting a slow, scenic MFA at CCNY. 

Martine Bellen is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Ghosts! (Spuyten Duyvil Press). Her collection Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), won the National Poetry Series. She collaborated with David Rosenboom on Ah! Opera No-Opera, which had its world premiere at REDCAT in L.A. She is currently collaborating with Zhang Er on the libretto Moon Lady: The Story of Chang E.

Nick Dybek is a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Short Fiction, A Maytag Fellowship, and a 2010 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. He lives in New York City. He reads from his novel: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man
”Robert Louis Stevenson would be proud of Nick Dybek...He delivers a page-turner full of danger, secrets, and betrayals.” Stewart O’Nan
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Claire Vaye Watkins reads from her book: Battleborn

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.

Born in 1941, Eamon Grennan is a Dublin native and Irish citizen who has lived in the United States for over thirty years. He was educated at University College in Dublin and Harvard University.  His collections include: Matter of Fact (Graywolf Press, 2008); The Quick of It, (2005); Renvyle, Winter (special limited edition, 2003); Still Life with Waterfall (2002), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Selected & New Poems (2000); Relations: New & Selected Poems (1998); So It Goes (1995), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; As If It Matters (1992); What Light There Is and Other Poems (1989), a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What Light There Is (1987); and Wildly for Days (1983).  His Leopardi: Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1997) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and he has published a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Creighton University Press, 1999).  In his citation for the 2003 Lenore Marshall Award, poet Robert Wrigley wrote, “Grennan would have us know—no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste, and smell—that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards.” As well as a number of Pushcart Prizes, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  He taught at Vassar College until his retirement. He lives in Poughkeepsie, and spends as much time as he can in the West of Ireland.

After an acting career, then a stint producing corporate videos and conferences, Gretl Claggett spent a decade as a saleswoman in the incentive (or “performance improvement”) industry. She’s what you might call a learning junkie, with MFAs in theater, poetry and nonfiction. She also possesses a passion for the healing arts, and is certified as a neurofeedback trainer and hypnotist. Drawing from this eclectic background—through writing, speaking and leading workshops — her mission is to help others create more authentic lives: personally and professionally.

Steve Griffiths was born on Anglesey, off the Welsh coast, and lives in London.  He will be reading from his sixth poetry collection, ‘Surfacing’, published by Cinnamon Press in late 2011.  Philip Gross, winner of the TS Eliot poetry prize in 2010, has written about Steve’s new book:

‘This is a varied but coherent collection by a subtle and deeply intelligent writer who can address human concerns like the intimate recall of childhood or the challenges of middle age without sentimentality........ His attention to detail and to nuance earns the poems a certain authority.......  It is an achievement to evoke the sensual qualities of a flock of starlings in flight while considering form and content in the widest sense; the complex of intellect and emotion in the phrase ‘mathematical / valedictory joy’ is a bold achievement’.

His previous book, ‘An Elusive State’ (Cinnamon, 2008), explores an imaginary civilisation.  Laura Thomas, a BBC producer who worked on performance from the book, described it thus: ‘It’s a parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery”. 

His Selected Poems were published by Seren in 1993.  This was followed by a 15-year-long break from publishing.  He works as a researcher and consultant in health and social policy, and is widely published in that field.  He is a campaigner against erosion of financial benefits for people with long-term health conditions in the UK. 

A note on ‘Surfacing’

‘Surfacing’ traces a movement from darkness into light.  It is not a simple movement.  It begins underground, in an abandoned place, where there are stirrings, occasional explosions into an inexplicably dazzling light, an insistence on miracles of optimism.  The tone shifts towards a recurrent note of affirmation in which darkness has its place, and is sometimes essential.  The poems look back, far back: ‘The Shelveian Event’ moves between the violence of shifting continents and the fossilised remains of individual raindrops; like many of these poems, it’s a celebration of the creation.  There is a repeated focus on childhood.  From all kinds of perspectives, Steve Griffiths is interested in how we came to be what we are.  He shines occasional sharp lights on the contemporary: being rejected for a job and knowing why; injustice in the Middle East; the decimation of wild birds; a woman singing hymns loudly in a London park. 

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.

Myra Shapiro born in the Bronx, returned to live in New York after forty- five years in Georgia and Tennessee where she married, raised two daughters and worked as a librarian and teacher of English. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Ohio Review, River Styx, Pearl, Ploughshares, The Poetry Miscellany, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals, and in many anthologies. She was awarded the New School’s Dylan Thomas Poetry Award and is the recipient of two fellowships from The MacDowell Colony. She serves on the Board of Directors of Poets House in New York City, a library and meeting place for poets. Her latest book is the memoir Four Sublets: Becoming a Poet in New York.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of three history books, including the bestseller best-seller Doubt: A History, and two volumes of poetry, The Next Ancient World and Funny. Her prose and poetry appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.  Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University in 1995 and now teaches in the MFA program of Columbia University and the Graduate Writing Program of The New School University.

Eleni Sikelianos received an M.F.A. in Writing & Poetics from the Naropa Institute. She is the author of Body Clock (Coffee House Press, 2008), The Book of Jon (City Lights Publishers, 2004), The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004), Earliest Worlds (2001), The Book of Tendons (1997), and To Speak While Dreaming (1993). She is also the author of a number of chapbooks, including From Blue Guide (1999), The Lover’s Numbers, and Poetics of the X (1995). She has received the NEA Fellowship for Poetry, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing. She currently teaches at Naropa University and the University of Denver.

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, most recently Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009). Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (1992-1997). Her honors include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was “poet in residence” with Bob Dylan’s famed concert tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue, in 1975–76. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery. In 1974, with Allen Ginsberg, Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is active with OCCUPY ART, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, in New York City.

Brian Schwartz’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared or will appear soon in Harvard Review, Ascent, Washington Square, The Seattle Review and others. His story “Different Skin” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He also writes the sports column A Fan’s Notes at TheRumpus.net. Schwartz received an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, where he was awarded a Regents Fellowship and the Cheng Fellowship in Fiction. He is now a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. 

Genevieve Leone’s poetry has appeared in Del Sol Review, Faultline, Pool and Zocalo Public Square. Her poems are also now appearing throughout New York City as part of the Great Egg Hunt, which you can follow on Facebook.

Brando Skyhorse’s first book, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Things My Fathers Taught Me, will be published in May 2013. 

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.

Chris Belden’s novel “Carry-on” was published in January by Rain Mountain Press. A recent graduate of the Fairfield University MFA Program, CB has published stories in numerous small magazines; co-wrote the 1997 feature film Amnesia (starring Ally Sheedy); co-wrote the play The Ballad of Larry the Flyer (NY Fringe Fest, 2001); and has released two albums of original tunes, Songs About Anything and Camouflage. He currently teaches writing at Fairfield U., as well as at a high-security men’s prison in CT.

Sarah (Sally) McElwain is the editor of “Saying Grace: Blessings for the Family Table” and the author of “To the Happy Couple! Creating a Great Wedding Toast with Style” (both published by Chronicle Books). Her story, “Born Lucky,” won second place in American Fiction, Volume 10. She works as graphic designer for Maimonides Medical Center and teaches yoga at the Integral Yoga Institute and Jewish Guild for the Blind. A former teacher at The Writers Studio, she now co-hosts the WRITERS READ series at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge and The Cornelia Street Café.

J.E. Reich hails originally from Pittsburgh, PA--a drinking town with a football problem--and received her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Her writing writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Armchair/Shotgun, Volume 1 Brooklyn, plain china: The Best of Undergraduate Writing 2010, KGB Bar & Lit Journal, Underground Voices, The Emerson Review, and others. Her writing was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010 and an EVVY Award in 2009, and she was the recipient of the Pitler Scholarship in 2011. Reich currently resides in Brooklyn, NY as a candidate for an MA in Literature at Brooklyn College, an intern for the Franklin Park Reading Series, and is currently working on her first novel.

Timothy Gager is the author of nine books of short fiction and poetry. His latest Treating a Sick Animal: Flash and Micro Fictions (Cervena Barva Press) features over forty stories, many previously published in various literary magazines. He has hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA every month for the past ten years.  His work has appeared in Night Train, Smokelong Weekly, McSweeneys, Hobart, Twelve Stories, JMWW, The Smoking Poet, Word Riot, Skive, Dogzplot, Metazen and many other venues.  He has had over 250 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007 and received nine Pushcart Prize nominations.  A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts and is employed as a social worker.

Series Host Susan Tepper

Rob MacDonald lives in Boston and is the editor of the online journal Sixth Finch. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Octopus, Hanging Loose, H_NGM_N, No Tell Motel, New CollAge, and Free Verse. Last New Death, a chapbook, was recently published by Scantily Clad Press.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Striking Surface, winner of the Richard Snyder prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Best American Poetry, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House among other places. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004. He currently directs the Writing Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Adam Wilson reads from his novel: Flatscreen

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.

Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He graduated from the University of Southern California, where he obtained a BFA in screenwriting and the University of Virginia, where he earned an MFA in creative writing. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Field, Pleiades, among other journals. He is the author of The Emily Dickinson Reader, Vol 1., an English-to-English translation of Dickinson forthcoming from McSweeney’s; The Madeleine Poems, which was selected as the winner of the 2009 Omnidawn Poetry Prize; and The Other Poems, from Fence Books. He is a co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works at The Academy of American Poets.

Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections, The Book of Funnels (Wave Books, 2005) and Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007); four chapbooks; and the cross-genre book Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).  In 2008 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. He translates contemporary German poetry, and with the German poet Uljana Wolf he translates the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. His own work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He lives in Brooklyn and Berlin.

Scott Wolven’s stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories seven years in a row, which marks the most consecutive appearances since Houghton Mifflin began the Best American series in 1915. Wolven is one of only fifteen living authors to be selected for The Best American Noir Of The Century, by guest editor James Ellroy and series editor Otto Penzler.  His collection of short stories, Controlled Burn, was selected for the fiftieth anniversary list of Books To Remember by The New York Public Library.  Controlled Burn was selected as Best First Fiction by Poets & Writers and received awards from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  He has been called a Master Of Noir by Library Journal and his novel False Hopes is forthcoming from Grove/Mysterious Press, along with his second collection of short stories, Hundred Proof.

Shanna McNair is the founding editor and publisher of The New Guard. Publications include Maine Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, Village Soup Times, and Fact-Simile. She was a Summer Literary Seminar 2010 fellowship recipient for work in both fiction and poetry. McNair is an award-winning journalist, works in the visual arts, and performs music. She lives in Knightville, Maine.

The London Express has called Michael Kimball “one of the finest new exponents of the classic thriller.” Kimball’s 1996 novel Undone received the Fresh Talent Award in the U.K. and rose to #4 on the London Times’ bestseller list. Together with Mouth to Mouth, Green Girls, and Firewater Pond, Kimball’s novels have been translated into 13 languages and read worldwide. Stage plays include Ghosts of Ocean House, nominated for the 2007 Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America, and The Secret of Comedy, recently seen at the Abingdon Theatre. “The best suspense stories are the ones that creep up on you, breathe on your neck and jump back into the shadows when you turn around. Michael Kimball plays that game with unnerving skill.” – New York Times Review of Books

From Publishers Weekly
It takes a finely tuned ear to write dialogue that rings true, and Charlie Stella (Charlie Opera, etc.) has it. With his hapless crooks and wry humor, he belongs in line behind Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake. Stella remains a master of creating complex and believable characters. Stella has quickly become one of crime fiction’s leading lights.  His latest novel, Johnny Porno, is available from Stark 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.

Since its opening in 1993, KGB Bar has become something of a New York literary institution. Please join Red Hen Press for an evening of poetry and conversation at the renowned bar, featuring award-winning writers Brendan Constantine, Lynnell Edwards, and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. For more information on this reading, please contact publicity@redhen.org.

Featured readers:

Brendan Constantine was born in 1967, the second child of two working actors. An ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities and one of its most recognized poets, he has served as a teacher of poetry in local schools and colleges for the last seventeen years. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, The Cortland Review, RUNES, and LA Times Bestseller The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. He released his first collection, Letters to Guns, in 2009 (Red Hen Press). He is currently poet-in-residence at the Windward School in West Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University Extension. He is also currently working with The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, bringing poetry workshops to Alzheimer’s patients throughout the southland. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Hollywood at Bela Lugosi’s last address. Red Hen Press will release his third collection, Calamity Joe, in March 2012.

Lynnell Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, Covet (2012), The Highwayman’s Wife (2007), and The Farmer’s Daughter (2003), all from Red Hen Press. Her book reviews and short fiction have been published nationally in such journals as Pleiades, The Hollins Critic, Connecticut Review, American Book Review, and New Madrid. She is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She also writes a books column for Louisville Magazine and is Board member of InKY, inc., sponsor of the monthly literary reading series InKY, which she co-produces.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has been a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholar, a writer-inresidence at the Montana Artists Refuge, and is a Cave Canem alumna. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Callaloo, Harvard Review, Subtropics, and other journals. She received first place in the 2011 Summer Literary Seminars poetry contest, won the Gulf Coast Magazine Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, and received second place in Narrative Magazine’s poetry contest. Bertram is a graduate of the writing programs at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College, where she taught creative writing and literature. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise, won the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine. Itwill be released by Red Hen Press in March 2012.

Jamal Joseph: Panther Baby

Sampson Starkweather’s chapbooks are The Heart is Green from So Much Waiting (Immaculate Disciples Press), City of Moths (Rope-a-Dope Press), and The Photograph (Horse Less Press). He is an editor of physics and chemistry books and co-founded Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press.

Christopher Salerno’s books include Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Series, 2010) and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). A new chapbook, ATM, is just out from Horse Less Press. New or recent poems can be found in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Jubilat, Jacket, American Letters and Commentary, Laurel Review, among others. He is currently an assistant professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey, and is managing editor of a brand new journal called Map Literary. He lives in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and Cary, North Carolina, and occasionally blogs at Whirl.

Jared Harel lives in Astoria, NY. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Centenary College, and plays drums for the NYC-based rock band, The Dust Engineers.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. Her work has appeared in The Second Pass, The Rumpus, The Atlantic Tech Channel and The Times Literary Supplement.

Justin Nobel covers science and culture for magazines and pens a blog about death for the funeral industry called Digital Dying. He lives in Blissville, a sliver of forgotten New York.

Rachel Riederer’s work has appeared in The Nation, Science, The Missouri Review, and The Rumpus, and Best American Essays. You can see more of her work at www.rachelriederer.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.

Martha Rhodes is the author of four poetry collections: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (winner of the Green Rose Prize), Mother Quiet, and most recently The Beds, just published in January 2012. She is the director of the Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry and is on the faculties of Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books in New York City.

Lynn Emanuel holds a BA from Bennington College, an MA from the City College of New York, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books of poetry, Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly--, which was awarded the Eric Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, and Noose and Hook.  Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry anthologies numerous times and is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.  She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Bennington College Low Residency MFA program.

LARS IYER and he’s coming to the U.S.to promote his 2nd novel, Dogma [2], which The Millions called one of the “most anticipated books of the year.” His first novel, Spurious, has been winning fans all over London. 3:AM Magazine just called it “The Best Novel of 2011” and it was the runner-up in The Guardian’s Not-the-Booker 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.

Kate Zambreno reads from her novel: Green Girl.
The work is an existential novel about shopping and make-up, and it’s been compared to The Bell Jar. Reviewed in Bookslut and by Blake Butler on HTML Giant, and Bookforum. Dennis Cooper named Kate one of his favorite young writers in a recent interview. Kate’s first novel O Fallen Angel, was voted a Best Book of 2010 by Michael Schaub on Bookslut.
Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels O Fallen Angel (2010, Chiasmus Press) and Green Girl (2011, Emergency Press). Heroines, a critical memoir revolving around the women of modernism, some of which was incubated on her blog Frances Farmer is My Sister, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. She is also a prose editor at Nightboat Books. She currently lives in North Carolina with her partner John and her puppy Genet.
“It cracks, it zings. It makes you call your girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone. It makes you scribble down lines into a notebook, as Zambreno scribbled endless epigraphs into Green Girl.” —Jessa Crispin, Kirkus Book Reviews
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Helen Phillips is the author of And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press, 2011) and the forthcoming children’s adventure novel Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (Delacorte Press, 2012). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, The Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award, and the Meridian Editors’ Prize. Her work will be featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts in 2012. A graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, she teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College. Originally from Colorado, Helen lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Thompson.

”A deeply interesting mind is at work in these wry, lyrical stories.” --Amy Hempel
”Haunted and lyrical and edible all at once” --Rivka Galchen.
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Suzanne Scanlon’s debut novel, Promising Young Women, will be published by Dorothy in the Fall of 2012, Ed. Danielle Dutton. Excerpts have appeared recently in The Iowa Review, DIAGRAM, Midwestern Gothic, PANK, kill author, Drunken Boat and other places. She teaches writing in the English Department of Columbia College Chicago and writes about theater for Time Out Chicago. Suzanne is also an actor currently developing the Chicago production of Telephone by the poet and playwright Ariana Reines.
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Sunday Fiction Curator Suzanne Dottino - contact - suzanne@kgbbbar.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.

British author FRANCIS SPUFFORD will read from his exhilarating new genre-bending novel, RED PLENTY. Following the reading, Spufford will be in conversation with A Public Space founding editor Brigid Hughes. This event is free and open to the public (ages 21+). Doors open at 7:00 PM. Books will be available for purchase.

PRAISE FOR RED PLENTY:

“Spufford, who has succeeded in turning possibly the least promising fictional material of all time into an incredibly smart, surprisingly involving and deeply eccentric book, a hammer-and-sickle version of Altman’s Nashville, with central committees replacing country music. . . . I am not alone in thinking that he has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature.”
—Nick Hornby, The Believer

“After making splash in England, Spufford’s newest novel is likely to do the same in the U.S. If you think that a novel about the planned economy of the USSR from the 1950s through the 1970s would be boring, think again. . . . By teetering delicately between history and fiction, the novel leaves readers with a sense of the period that could not have been achieved with a straight, factual approach.”—Booklist

“Though the intricacies of Soviet central planning may seem an unlikely topic for a work of historical fiction, Spufford succeeds at distilling the dismal science into a page-turner and using the unconventional vehicles of linear planning, cybernetics, communal agricultural policy, and exposition on the respective merits of Marx and Hayek (buttressed by extensive footnotes) to explore the entire range of human emotion. . . . Extensively researched and both convincing and compelling in its idiosyncrasies . . . this genre-bending book surprised in many ways.”
—Publishers Weekly

ABOUT RED PLENTY:

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And for just a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.
Red Plenty is history, it’s fiction, it’s as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

Francis Spufford was born in 1964, meaning that he grew up with the USSR as a seemingly permanent feature of the planet. Red Plenty is, among other things, an attempt to understand that vanished world. Two of his previous books have been published in the United States, I May Be Some Time, about the tragedy of the Antarctic explorer Robert Scott, and The Child That Books Built, a memoir of a childhood as a compulsive reader. He lives near Cambridge, England.

Brigid Hughes is the founding editor of A Public Space. Previously,she was executive editor at The Paris Review. She received the 2011 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing. Francis Spufford’s work appeared in A Public Space Issue 11.

Review copies, author photographs, and interviews available upon request.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry and Creative Writing at Manhattanville College. She received her B.A. in Russian language and literature from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. In 2002 she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poems have been published in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry London, and the New York Times, among others. In 2008 she was asked to read in the Love Poems program at the Library of Congress. She lives in Armonk, New York with her husband, John. They share four children, Ben, Angie, Kaitlin and Fiona. Her first book, Talking Underwater, was published in 2007 by Wind Publications. A previous version of “Fear Speaks” appears in her second book, Second Skin, published by Wind Publications in 2010.

Douglas Collura is a Manhattan-based writer. He was a Second Prize winner in the 1999 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, along with being an Editor’s Choice selection for the Paterson Literary Review, and was also the 2008 First Prize Winner of the Missouri Review Audio/Video Competition in Poetry. He is the author of Things I Can Fit My Whole Head Into, published by Jane Street Press, which was a finalist for the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. His work has been published in Coe Review, The Cynic, Dislocate, The Dos Passos Review, Eclipse, Paterson Literary Review, Lips Magazine, Sierra Nevada College Review, and other periodicals, Web sites and webzines. 

Fred Dasig is a graduate student at the City College of New York, where he studies childhood education. His first chapbook, Fresh From the Dryer was released in 2009 by City Mouse Books.

Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica, and has received much recognition and many awards for her writing in both poetry and prose, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and most recently one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. Her work has been included in the major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry published in the United States, Europe and the West Indies over the past fifteen years, most recently in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) as well as the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, and the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Her work has also been translated into several languages, and published widely in magazines from the Hudson Review to MS Magazine.

Elizabeth Haukaas received the Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The New England Review, Crab Orchard Review, North American Poetry Review, William and Mary Review, New Millennium Writings, Agenda, and Tulane Review. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Her poetry collection, Leap, winner of the Walt McDonald First-book Award, was published in 2009 by Texas Tech University Press. She has three grown children who live all over the world; she lives in New York City, where, in her day job, she heads the corporate communications department of a financial services firm.

William Herman has published poems and short stories in the Missouri Review, Inkwell, Word(s) and other journals His The Man Who Beat Life & Other Tales is being reviewed for publication.

Gerry LaFemina is the author of five collections of poems, two collections of prose poems, and a book of short stories.  A new collection, The Vanishing Horizon (2011), is out from Anhinga Press.  He directs the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University, where he also teaches.

Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Open Book Award.  He has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Bomb, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.  He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University and is a 2009 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books and is currently teaching at Fordham University. Visit www.willieperdomo.com. 

Ellen Pickus taught English and creative writing for thirty years on Long Island, where she lives with her husband and her son.  Retired, she now conducts creative writing workshops for adults and does volunteer work at a local public school.  The topics of her poems range from summers spent in the mountains to the joys and challenges of raising a special needs child. Her woek has appeared in the Long Island Quarterly; PPA Review; Fan Magazine; Midwest Poetry Review; Candlelight and Toward Forgiveness, an anthology edited by Gayl Teller.

Holly Posner is the author of Explorations in American Culture and has taught at the New School, Hunter College, and NYU. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence, where she was editor of the graduate writing literary journal. She is currently editor of Line, a journal for the Hadar Foundation which sponsors scholarships for young people in the creative arts. Winner of the 2005 Greenburgh Poetry Competition, her work has appeared in Lumina, Rattapallax, The Laurel Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Westchester Review, The Same and the anthology, Let The Poets Speak.

Norman Stock is the author of two books of poetry:  Pickled Dreams Naked (NYQ Books, 2010) and Buying Breakfast For My Kamikaze Pilot (Gibbs Smith, 1994, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Contest). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, College English, New York Quarterly, Verse, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies and textbooks. Formerly the Acquisitions Librarian at Montclair State University, from which he retired in 2005, he lives in Jackson Heights, New York.

Jacob M. Appel’s short fiction has appeared in more than 200 leading literary journals. His prose has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review’s Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and many others, and has been short-listed for the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Jacob’s plays have been performed in New York City, regionally and abroad. Jacob has taught at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Jacob holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown, an M.A. and an M.Phil. from Columbia, an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. from N.Y.U. and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He also publishes in the field of bioethics. He practices medicine at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. More at: www.jacobmappel.com

Lisa Ferber is a prolific multidisciplinary satirist. Her paintings and illustrations have shown at National Arts Club, Chashama, Governors Island Art Fair, and other galleries, and sell to private collectors. Her plays and songs have been performed at La Mama, The Duplex, The Brick, and other venerable locations, and her play “Bonbons for Breakfast” was a New York magazine “notable production.” Her play “Lisa Ferber’s ‘An Evening With Molly Hadafew’” is published in “The Book of Estrogenius 2008.” She has read her stories at Dirty Laundry, Barbes, and at Drunken! Careening! Writers! Her story “Advice From Someone Using” will be published in Three Room Press’s upcoming anthology “Have a NYC.” She made her singing debut in the musical “Whimsellica’s Grand Inheritance,” which she wrote with Emmy-nominated composer Robert Firpo-Cappiello. “Whimsellica’s Grand Inheritance” was then turned into a film, screenplay by and featuring Ms. Ferber. She experiences frequent bursts of gratitude for living in New York City.You can find out more about her work by visiting www.LisaFerber.com

David Pratt won a 2011 Lambda Literary Award for his debut novel, “Bob the Book.” His story collection, “My Movie,” will be released by Chelsea Station Editions in March 2012, including new work and short fiction originally published in Christopher Street, The James White Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Velvet Mafia, and other periodicals, and in the anthologies His3 and Fresh Men 2. David has directed and performed his own work for the theater, including appearances in New York City at the Cornelia Street Cafe, Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, the Flea Theater, and the New York International Fringe Festival. He has collaborated frequently with Rogerio M. Pinto, and he was the first director of work by the Canadian playwright John Mighton. David holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School. 

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:

N. K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, won the Locus award and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.  Her fourth novel, The Killing Moon, is forthcoming in May from Orbit Books. You can read some of her short fiction and excerpts of each novel at nkjemisin.com.

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Livia Llewellyn is the author of the short story collection Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, published by Lethe Press. Her fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Subterranean, ChiZine, and Postscripts and will be in The Best Horror of the Year Volume Four. She’s currently working on her first novel.

www.kgbfantasticfiction.org

Christopher Bram: Gay Writers that Changed America

Star Black is the author of six books of poems, most recently Velleity’s Shade (Saturnalia Books), a collaboration with Bill Knott. Her work includes three books of sonnets, Waterworn, Balefire, and Ghostwood, as well as a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time, and a book of collaged texts, October for Idas. Her poems have been anthologized in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1880 to The Present, and 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11. She has taught at The New School, Stony Brook University, has lectured at the Bennington Writers Seminars, and is the co-founder of the KGB Bar Poetry Series in the East Village. She works in New York City as a photographer and visual artist.

Louis Asekoff is the author of Dreams of a Work (Orchises Press, 1993) and North Star (Orchises Press, 1997). His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, among others. His awards include Jerome Shestack Prize, American Poetry Review. He received an NYFA Fellowship in 1998 and an NEA Fellowship in 1998.

Mark Ford was born Nairobi, Kenya. He has a BA and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He has published three collections of poetry, Landlocked (1991), Soft Sift (2001), and Six Children (2011). He has also published a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel, and a parallel text edition of Roussel’s final poem, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (New Impressions of Africa). He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and a selection of his reviews and essays have been published in two volumes, A Driftwood Altar (2005) and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011). He is currently editing an anthology of the poetry of London for Harvard University Press.

An Evening with Slice Magazine
Slice is a Brooklyn-based literary magazine dedicated to bridging the gap between emerging writers and the publishing world. Each issue features writing from tomorrow’s literary legends alongside interviews with today’s most renowned authors. Tonight, Slice contributors will read fiction, non-fiction, and poetry about life’s immortal theme--love.

Kathleen Alcott’s debut novel, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, is forthcoming from Other Press in fall of 2012. Her work appears on TheRumpus.net; Rumpus Women Vol. 1, an anthology of personal essays by women; and The Bold Italic. A copywriter by day, she is currently at work on her second novel, a book that traces the lives of four tenants of an apartment building in New York City and their rapidly deteriorating landlord.

Sarah Gerard is a Brooklyn-based writer and bookseller. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Word Riot and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is an MFA candidate at The New School.

Lucas Hunt was born in rural Iowa. His debut collection of poetry, Lives, was published to critical acclaim in 2006. His poems have appeared in many literary reviews, including The Southampton Review, Confrontation, and Anderbo. Hunt studied at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and in the MFA program at Southampton College. He is the recipient of a John Steinbeck Award for poetry. He lives in East Hampton, NY, where he works at a literary agency.

Ian F. King has written here and there for Slice magazine going back to issue #2, and he also now edits the website’s literary events calendar. He’s a contributing music writer for Line, a book review editor for KGB Lit Journal, and his writing has also appeared in Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Take the Handle and Nylon, among other places.

Sharona Moskowitz received an MA in Applied Linguistics from Columbia University and a BA in English from the University of Vermont. She spent several years living in Japan where she researched and taught at a private university near Tokyo. She currently lives in Manhattan.

John Trotta is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Hunter College. His first published work, “Only Once, and Even Then,” appears in Slice’s upcoming 10th issue.

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.

Kenneth Wishnia’s novels include 23 Shades of Black, an Edgar Allan Poe Award and Anthony Award finalist; Soft Money, a Library Journal Best Mystery of the Year; Red House, a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year; and The Fifth Servant, an Indie Notable selection, winner of a Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO, and a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award (Macavity Awards).

His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Queens Noir, Long Island Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere.

He teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College on Long Island.

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Tom Coffey is a writer and editor with an extensive background in journalism. He is the author of three novels—THE SERPENT CLUB (1999), MIAMI TWILIGHT (2001) and BLOOD ALLEY (2008). Both THE SERPENT CLUB and BLOOD ALLEY received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly. BLOOD ALLEY will be published in e-book and paperback by Amazon Encore later this year. (At least that’s what he hopes.)
A graduate of the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, Tom has been a reporter and editor for some of America’s leading newspapers. A staff editor at The New York Times since 1997, he has also worked for New York Newsday, The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and The Miami Herald.  Tom lives in Lower Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

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Rosemary Harris is a former bookstore manager and video executive who started writing mysteries when she read a two line item in the NY Times about a mummified body found near her home in Connecticut. She is the author of four traditional mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Paula Holliday. The books have been called “a perfect book for summer” (NPR CT) “clever mystery..fast-paced and engaging” Seattle Post-Intelligencer and “a wikld and funny ride” Crtimespree Magazine. She is the former president of Mystery Writers of America’s NY Chapter and Sisters in Crime’s New England Chapter.

Chris Adrian, named by the New Yorker as one of America’s best young writers - a “20 under 40” - is the author of three novels and one story collection.  His most recent novel is The Great Night, an “inventive and scarily beautiful...extraordinary novel” that recasts Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to modern-day San Francisco.  Chris’s fiction has appeared in TheNew Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story and in Best American Short Stories.  He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and lives in San Francisco, where he is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology.

Ayad Akhtar’s “self-assured and effortlessly told” debut novel, American Dervish, “is an immensely entertaining coming-of-age story” set in the Pakistani-American community of Milwaukee in the early 1980’s.  Ayad, a first-generation Pakistani-American who himself grew up in Milwaukee, is also an actor, playwright, and screenwriter.  His most recent screen role was in HBO’s Too Big To Fail.  He was a star and co-writer of The War Within, which premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay and an International Press Academy Satellite Award for Best Picture - Drama.  His latest stage plays are The Invisible Hand, which will premiere at St. Louis Repertory Theater in March 2012, and Disgraced, which premieres this month at the American Theatre Company in Chicago.  Disgraced is also under option with the Broadway producers of Urinetown and Wicked.  Ayad lives in New York City.

Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2011, and a Library Journal Top Ten Book of 2011. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly pronounced it “A delicate, heartbreaking portrait...Readers will finish [this] exceptional book profoundly moved.” Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, was a 2002 New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2002, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist. Julie is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian American Literary Award, and the American Library Association Alex Award.  She lives in New York City.

Jerry Williams’ first collection of poems, Casino of the Sun, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2003, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  His second collection, Admission, published by Carnegie Mellon in 2010, received the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award.  In addition, he served as editor of the anthology, It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup, published by The Overlook Press in 2010.  His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Witness, and many other literary journals.  He lives in New York and teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College.

Beth Gylys is an Associate Professor at Georgia State University. She has published two collections of poetry—Spot in the Dark (Ohio State University Press, 2004) and Bodies That Hum (Silverfish Review Press, 1999). Her work has appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.

Donna Masini is the author two collections of poems—Turning to Fiction (W.W. Norton & Co., 2004) and That Kind of Danger (W.W. Norton & Co., 1998). Her poems have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, and Parnasus. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pushcart Prize, she is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College. She lives in New York City.

Ravi Shankar is the founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat, one of the world’s oldest and most highly reputed online journal of the arts, and chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust. He has published or edited seven books or chapbooks of poems, including the National Poetry Review prize winning “Deepening Groove,” and W.W. Norton’s “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond,” called “a beautiful achievement for world literature,” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Puschart Prize, appeared on the BBC and NPR, been featured in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and has performed his work around the world, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and at the Miami Book Fair. He is currently on the faculty of CCSU and the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong. 

Writers for the 99: Occupying Wall Street, the inside story of an action that changed america

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1999). She has taught creative writing at University of California-Irvine and at the University of Redlands, but has primarily made her living as a librarian and library manager. Her poems have been selected for four editions of the annual Best American Poetry anthology (Scribner’s) and her poetry and essays have been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000), Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner’s, 2003), The Grand Permission: New Writing about Motherhood and Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and others. Her work has also been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slope, Pool, ZYZZYVA, LIT, and other journals. She was a curator for the Casa Romantica Reading Series for poets and fiction writers in San Clemente, California from 2004-2010.

David Lehman co-founded Monday Night Poetry at KGB Bar with Star Black. The duo ran the series for its first seven years. Lehman, who has taught in the New School’s MFA program since its inception, is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, and the author of eight poetry books including The Daily Mirror (2000), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), and Yeshiva Boys (2009). A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, the most recent of his six books of prose, won the 2010 Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).

Carter Sickels reads from his novel: The Evening Hour
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“[The Evening Hour] is grounded in rich storytelling.” – Publishers Weekly

“First-time novelist Sickels paints Cole’s experience with an unflinching hand.” – Library Journal
“Intensely lyrical… Sickels has great insight into the emotional life of West Virginians, and he refreshingly presents them as fully realized characters rather than as clichés or stereotypes.” – Kirkus
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Stephen Stark reads from his novel: The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door
Brilliant, Sexy, Edgy Page-Turner With a Twist
It’s been nearly 20 years since Stephen Stark earned critical acclaim from Bret Lott, Andrea Barrett, and Larry Brown for his New York Times Book Review Notable Book Second Son. Now he’s back with a literary thrill ride, The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door, from Shelf Media Group.

The genre-bending The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door is a wholly original and unputdownable book that’s like no novel you’ve read.

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.

Julia LoFaso’s recently completed first novel takes place in 1940s Astoria, Queens, and tells the story of an Italian widow who makes a deal with the Virgin Mary to get her two oldest sons home safe from the war. Julia also lives in Astoria, but in the present day. Her food writing and fiction have appeared in Edible Queens, New York Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. 

Chris Garrecht-Williams was born and raised in New York City, ran away to California for ten years, and moved back home to pursue an MFA, which he finishes tomorrow. He is a bartender, a senior poetry editor at Narrative Magazine, and has poems published now and then.

Rachel Carter is the author of the upcoming young adult novel So Close to You, which will be published this summer through HarperCollins. She is a graduate of Columbia University where she received her MFA. Her nonfiction has appeared in Verbicide Magazine and the Faster Times. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is hard at work on her next YA novel.

What is Faculty Selects?  The first Thursday of each month the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series with writers selected by the faculty. These fresh talents have completed their coursework and 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 2013!

Faculty Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke and Emily Austin.

Henry Alford reads from WOULD IT KILL YOU TO STOP DOING THAT.

Series resumes.

Rebecca Gee, Lucinda Holt, Martha Qualben and Rachael Nevins

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.

Paragraph’s monthly reading series at KGB showcases our members’ work. Join us in January for a reading by Lee Bob Black and Stacy Gueraseva. Free and open to the public.

Lee Bob Black interviews authors and writes book reviews for fun. His serious work consists of novels, short stories, and essays. He’s the co-director of a literary program for Canteen Magazine and the founder of the International Literary Film Festival. Previously he has worked for BigThink.com, One Story, and other literary magazines.

Moscow-born and Bronx-raised, Brooklyn-dwelling Stacy Gueraseva is the author of Def Jam, Inc. (Random House, 2005), about the history of Def Jam Records. She has been writing about music and pop culture for national magazines since 1995. Fun fact: she’s an identical twin.

Hosted by the [tk] review (www.thetkreview.com), come with a book (or several) that you’ve read but no longer want to keep, and swap with your fellow book fiends for something new to stimulate your reading palate. While you browse and barter, enjoy cheap drinks, free baked goods courtesy of [tk], and, of course, scintillating company. All leftover books will be donated to Housing Works or Books Through Bars, as appropriate. 

Peg Boyers (CRF 2004) is the author of two books of poetry: Hard Bread (2002) and Honey with Tobacco (2007).  Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Guernica, Slate, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among others.  She is executive editor of Salmagundi and is a professor of English at Skidmore College, where she also teaches poetry at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

Nicholas Dawidoff (CRF 2005) is the author of four books. The Catcher Was a Spy was a national bestseller. In the Country of Country was named one of the one hundred greatest works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveller. The Fly Swatter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography/autobiography. The Crowd Sounds Happy, part of which was written at Civitella Ranieri, won the Kenneth Johnson Book Prize for writing about mental illness. His writing appears in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Berlin Prize fellow of the American Academy and an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He is the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology. Working on his next book about why football is the pastime of our time, he has spent this year embedded with the coaching staff of the New York Jets.

Mary Gaitskill (CRF 2008) is the author of the novels “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” and “Veronica,” as well as the story collections “Bad Behavior,” “Because They Wanted To,” and “Don’t Cry.” Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.  Last year she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library where she was researching a novel. 

An evening with four local New York City actors reading excerpts of their own material:

Deborah Shannon – In addition to her work in numerous national television commercials and stage productions, Deborah has enjoyed a long career in radio doing voice-overs for commercials and as the lead role in the long-running telenovela Cafe.  She has landed principle roles in six feature films and has starred in several television shows such as Dexter (Showtime), Mysteries (The BBC), Discover America (The Travel Channel), and Portraits of Faith (NBC) for which she earned an Emmy nomination. She will complete her masters in creative writing at Florida International University this spring. Her short stories that have appeared in many online magazines, and she has written three screenplays and a three-act play for the stage. This is her first novel, one in a series. Ms. Shannon currently lives in Manhattan.

Erica Fae – Fae’s most recent work as performer and co-writer (with Jill A. Samuels) Take What Is Yours inaugurated the New OHIO theatre this past October with a workshop production. Come see it this May! As writer/performer, Fae’s solo play A Girl Joan was commissioned by DTW, and performed at NYTW, The Culture Project, and HERE, where she was also awarded a HARP residency to develop new work. Her short films have screened at festivals worldwide, for which she received “Best Short” and “Best Actress” awards. As actor, she has worked with Martha Clarke (Vienna Lusthaus at NYTW, Midsummer at A.R.T., Hans Christian Andersen at A.C.T.), Rachel Dickstein/Ripe Time (Fire Throws at 3LD, playing Antigone), and Ping Chong, among others; and can be seen in films Synecdoche New York, The Savages, Little Children, Please Give, and others. She also teaches physical acting at Yale and The New School (MFA programs), and at NYU’s ETW, where she also studied. www.ericafae.com

T. Graham Brown - Stage credits include: Edward in Edward II, Melchior in Spring Awakening, Shep in Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar and Grille, Danny in Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Shakespeare in 4Play, Sex in a Series, Sam in Finding Gräfenberg, Ben in Seascape with Shark and Dancer; twelve roles in Macbeth and Alex in the second American production of A Clockwork Orange.  Film credits include: The Dark Knight Rises, Sweet and Lowdown, New York - The Documentary and Entourage. He has performed stand-up at the Improv, The New York Comedy Club, The Funny Bone, The Laff Stop and Froggy Bottoms. Grahamis currently the Executive Producer of trip2media and the Artistic Director of trip.

Annette Guarrasi - Annette began her acting career performing improv and sketch comedy in NYC, predominantly with Gotham City Improv. After her sarcasm muscles began to ache, she challenged herself with Shakespeare and was fortunate to study for a summer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Eventually, she found that her love for writing comic character monologues led her to a Solo Performance Workshop with Kirsten Ames, where she created “Never Show the Ugly,” her first solo show.  Tonight’s reading is an excerpt from her memoir, “It Ain’t Pretty.” Like Annette, it is a work-in-progress. www.annetteguarrasi.com

Hosted by Lee Anderson

Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire, the winner of three awards, which has been translated into five languages. Avery teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City. She reads from her novel Last Nude “An erotic and powerful as the paintings that inspired it. Ellis Avery’s artist-muse love story is as much about money, class and, betrayal.” Emma Donoghue
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Eli Gottlieb, author of the New York Times Notable Book, The Boy Who Went Away, and the bestselling Now You See Him, He reads from his new novel: The Face Thief. “Written with the literary flair of an Ian McEwan novel and reminiscent of Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply”
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Fiction curator Suzanne Dottino/contact: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.

A New York Tyrant party with readings from Daniel Long, Michael Bible, and Chiara Barzini, followed by Tao Lin and Giancarlo DiTrapano doing a special one-time double-reading of “Andrew: A Dialogue of Texts in the Year of Drugs and Kindness,” from Vice Magazine, a piece that’s been called “incendiary,” and “this year’s best online writing,” and “this is stupid.” 7:00 January 21st 2012

Tao Lin (b. 1983) is the author of RICHARD YATES (2010) and five other books. Vintage is publishing his third novel in 2013. Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tao_lin.

Chiara Barzini’s collection of new short fictions, Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012), has been defined by Gary Shteyngart as “The best thing to come out of Italy since espresso” and Jonathan Ames has calls her stories “kaleidoscopic arrangements of sentences and situations of freakish originality and beauty.” She is a screen and fiction writer living in Rome. Films written by her have been distributed in Italy, Spain, Japan, and Latin America.

Daniel Long is an Oklahoman living in New York. His work has appeared. His hobbies include needlepoint and revenge.

Giancarlo DiTrapano is editor of the New York Tyrant.

Michael Bible wrote Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City (Dark Sky Books) and Simple Machines (Awesome Machine Press). He’s published in Artifice, Barrelhouse, Oxford American and ESPN the magazine. He lives in Mississippi and edits Kitty Snacks.

Online literary and culture magazine The Nervous Breakdown features the work of authors and poets from around the world. Tonight’s event, emceed by TNB contributor, T.K. Danovich, will feature the following authors reading from their work.

RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL, a columnist for SexIs Magazine, has edited over 40 anthologies, including Women in Lust, Obsessed, Passion, Orgasmic, Fast Girls, Bottoms Up, The Mile High Club, Do Not Disturb and the Best Sex Writing series, and has won 6 IPPY (Independent Publisher) Awards. She hosted In The Flesh Reading Series for five years. Her writing has been published in over 100 anthologies, including Susie Bright’s X: The Erotic Treasury and Best American Erotica 2004 and 2006. She has written for The Daily Beast, The Frisky, The Gloss, Lemondrop, Mediabistro, Newsday, Penthouse, The Root, Salon, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, xoJane, Zink and other publications, and teaches erotic writing workshops nationwide. She is a founding editor of the blog Cupcakes Take the Cake.

GREG OLEAR is The Nervous Breakdown’s senior editor and the author of the novels TOTALLY KILLER and FATHERMUCKER, an L.A. Times bestseller.  He teaches creative writing an Manhattanville College.

DIANA SPECHLER is the author of the novels WHO BY FIRE and SKINNY, and has written for the New York Times, GQ, Esquire, Details, O Magazine, Nerve, and elsewhere. She has an MFA degree from the University of Montana and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.

SHYA SCANLON is the Fiction Reviews Editor for The Nervous Breakdown and the other of the prose poetry book In This Alone Impulse andt he novel Forecast. Scanlon’s work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Literary Review, New York Quarterly, Guernica Magazine, Opium Magazine, and others. He received his MFA from Brown University, where he was awarded the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.

Kevin R. Free, one of NYTheatre.com’s15 people of the year for 2010, is a writer-performer whose thoughts have been heard on NPR, Dana Rossi’s the Soundtrack Series, and - in February 2012 - on the mainstage of The Moth. As a member of the New York Neo-Futurists, he wrote over 60 short plays for Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. His full-length Neo-Futurist play, (Not) Just a Day Like Any Other, co-written with Christopher Borg, Jeffrey Cranor, and Eevin Hartsough, won a NY Innovative Theatre Award in 2009. His full-length plays, Face Value and A Raisin in the Salad: Black Plays for White People have been published by indietheaternow.com, and the first scene of his newest full-length, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, will premiere in The Fire This Time Festival in January 2012.

Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.  He received a B.A. in Communications from Adelphi University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College.  His debut novel, Chulito, was released in October 2011, and he co-edited, with Charlie Vázquez, From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction released in August 2011. He is an award-winning playwright and serves on the boards of the Bronx Council on the Arts and the National Association of Latino Art and Cultures.

Brett Warwick is a writer, actor, musician, and professional office manager. He received his BFA in Acting from Emerson College and an MA in Theatre Studies from Hunter College. As a founding member of theatreflecitve, Brett wrote and directed several projects - most notably the critically acclaimed music and lyrics to Massholia.  He is the singer, song writer, and guitar player for The Trembling Turncoats.

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.

Dale Peck reads from his novel: The Garden of Lost and Found.

Publisher: Mischief + Mayhem/OR Books.

History: Written from 1998 - 2000, The Garden of Lost and Found was twice scheduled for publication, first by a large press and then by a small one, that were both purchased and dissolved by larger corporations. Originally slated for a 2001 release, the book was shelved after HarperCollins purchased William Morrow and eliminated its Rob Weisbach Books imprint. This was in some ways fortuitous, as 9/11 completely changed the landscape of the novel, which is set only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. After shelving the book for five years, Peck revised it in 2005 - 2006 and sold it to Carroll and Graf, only to see that company purchased and disbanded by Perseus Books. Now, a decade after it was first completed, it’s finally seeing the light of day—assuming M+M and OR can avoid the curse that’s plagued its publishers.

“There is so much to say about this novel that the only way to begin is to draw a conclusion: it is brilliant. That said, its properties and attributes can be explained. Peck is a tough, outspoken literary critic (Hatchet Jobs, 2004) and a provocative novelist (Martin and John, 1992). His latest work of fiction is beautifully articulated; this writer appreciates language not for its tricks but for its power to genuinely stir heart and mind. Thematically, the novel is about finding yourself; in plot, it follows the exploits of a 21-year-old man, orphaned and having lived from pillar to post across the country, who inherits from the mother he never knew a large townhouse in New York City’s Lower Manhattan, in other words, a real-estate gold mine. James Ramsay, who is gay, believes himself to be infected with AIDS. His tenure in the Big Apple is truly at the mercy of the group of characters he rather inherits as the new owner of the house, including the building’s only tenant, an elderly black woman. The intricately worked out story line is rich in human concerns: survival (food and shelter, that is) and respect and love. Ensconced in his new home, but for how long he does not know (remember, he believes himself gravely ill), James’ primary focus is to learn about his mother and possibly even determine who his father is. This busy, compulsive novel, a deeply human and humanizing book, gathers lush detail as it gains speed.” — Brad Hooper, Booklist.
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Jonathan Dozier-Ezell hails from a collection of small towns in Alabama and came to New York City by way of The New School where he received his MFA last spring. A smattering of his short fiction can be found online at Terrain and DOGZPLOT. He is currently working on a novel set in one of those Alabama towns.

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.

Prior to developing Eldercation, Harry J. Getzov worked as an attorney in the music and entertainment business, first as Vice President of Business Affairs at Atlantic/Select Records and then as a solo practitioner, counseling artists in the music, theater, literary, television and motion-picture industries. He also served as personal manager for several well-known entertainers, including The Jerky Boys, who, under his guidance, achieved international success in music and in comedy, selling millions of albums and videos, as well as starring in their own major motion picture. The Jerky Boys were twice nominated for Grammy Awards as Best Spoken Word recording artists.

In addition to a degree of Juris Doctor from Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, Getzov obtained a bachelor’s degree from Boston University’s College of Liberal Arts and studied at the Brookdale Center on Aging of Hunter College in New York City. He has been admitted to the practice of law in the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His articles have appeared in the New York Daily News, Newsday, The Dallas Morning News, The Kansas City Star and amNew York, and he has been a guest on radio in the communities he has visited throughout the country. Getzov speaks frequently to students as well as to public and private audiences about Eldercation and intergenerational communication.

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Nina Camp’s writing appears regularly in the mailboxes of those who seek remedies for prostate enlargement, incontinence, arthritis, insomnia, impotence, and digestive imbalance. Hopefully, many among Nina’s target audience get relief, safely and naturally. As a direct mail alternative health copywriter in New York City, Nina has had time to pursue training as an opera singer, for which her degree in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music served her well. She’s also had time to madly pursue writing personal essays, one of which was just published in the literary journal White Whale Review, another of which attracted an encouraging form letter (“We remain interested in your work and would like to see more”) from The Paris Review. 

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Brian Kim is secretly from the South, but it’s a secret, so don’t tell anyone (especially him). He graduated this past June from Queens College with an MFA in Creative Writing. He focuses on short fiction. He was a 2011 writer-in-residence at the Louis Armstrong House Museum Archive, where he learned several dirty jokes—many of which you will hear tonight. He’s currently an adjunct professor at Queens College.