KGB Bar

Suzanne Dottino received her MFA from Columbia. Her work has appeared in Bloomsbury Review, Brooklyn Review, Brooklyn Rail, Heeb.com, Esposus.com, kgbbarlit.com and others. She is curator for the Sunday Night fiction reading series at KGB. She’ll be reading from An Absolutely Perfect Life (I have a handsome Harvard boyfriend who wants to marry me! Ok, he’s got a pesky drug habit but so what, doesn’t everyone? I’m a ballerina! Ok, well, my career has been derailed a little since we met, BUT we live in a swank Fifth Avenue apartment and OK his mother has the key and uses it whenever she wants, but that’s . . . FINE. We go on First Class vacations! Well, the last one ended with Robert getting thrown in jail for bringing drugs across the border. Anyway, aside from all that, my life, at 19 years old, is, as my mother says, and I think I should agree with her, my oyster. And yet…)

Lisa Chamberlain, author, Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, will read from Summer of Lust: A Personal History, which includes the line, “If I am a lesbian, it’s only from the waist up.”

Raven Snook is a writer, performer, diva and mom. As a journalist, she has contributed entertainment-related articles to Time Out, The Village Voice, the New York Post, TV Guide, AOL TV and Moviefone, New York Magazine’s Web site and Heeb, and she’s currently the Web director for Time Out Kids. As a performer, she has hosted myriad burlesque shows, including Starshine Burlesque, Red Hots Burlesque, The Hot Box Burlesque and Le Scandal, and also created the all-Jewish revue Kosher ChiXXX and all-moms Hot Mama Burlesque. Other performing highlights include acting in the original downtown run of Urinetown, portraying a vampire on the ABC sitcom Talk to Me, appearing as a “female female impersonator” on The Maury Povich Show, playing a dominatrix-like self-help guru in the short film Slo-Mo, telling stories at The Moth and Heeb Storytelling, and her autobiographical one-woman show How I Became a Drag Queen Trapped in a Woman’s Body.

Michael Leone’s work has been published or is forthcoming in New York Tyrant, Indiana Review, Sou’wester, Southern Review, Carolina Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, and other venues. I also review books for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Plain Dealer, and the Kansas City Star. He’ll read from an unpublished memoir about his mother and growing up in Worcester, MA.

Kurt Opprecht is a writer, editor, and writing coach in NYC.  Until Mr. Obama spoiled all the fun, he was an active member of Billionaires for Bush, and edited their book, “How to Rule the World for Fun and Profit.” His play, “Dos Coyotes” is undergoing some sort of development with the TerraNova Collective.  Kurt currently teaches at Gotham Writer Workshop and runs the Bananafish Writers Groups. His fiction/memoir hybrid weaves contemporary adventures among the primitive hill tribes in northern Thailand with contrasting explorations into Bangkok’s world of bar girls, prostitutes, sex shows and gay clubs.  Beyond all the sex, drugs and death, the book takes a stab at the specter of the collapse of the modern world and a global return to the “primitive” way of life.

Liza Monroy is the author of the novel Mexican High and has written for the New York Times, LA Times, Newsweek, the Village Voice, Jane magazine and other publications.  She teaches writing at Columbia University, where she is earning her MFA in Nonfiction, and lives in Brooklyn.  She married her gay best friend for his green card the same month her mother received an award from the INS for preventing illegal immigration.  Liza’s memoir, A Gay Husband, is about their adventures as husband and wife as they journey from Calfornia to Las Vegas to New York City, and how this marriage that wasn’t a marriage, in the end, really was.

Helaine Olen is a journalist and essayist. Her work has been published in numerous newspapers, magazines and on-line publications, including The New York Times “Modern Love” column, The Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, and, most recently, the April issue of Portfolio Magazine. She’s also the co-author of Office Mate: The Employee Handbook for Finding and Managing Romance on the Job, which was described as “thoughtful” and “persuasive” by Time Magazine. In addition, her essay “The Mean Moms” was included in The Maternal is Political, an anthology published last year by Seal Press. She’ll be reading her unpublished essay “The Chick Magnet,” which is about how a mother reacts when she realizes her son reminds her of other family members.

About the Series: KGB Non-Fiction

Every Tuesday