KGB Bar

Amy Hempel, a master of the short story who has been compared to Grace Paley, Alice Munro and Ann Beattie, is a lecturer in creative writing at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Hempel is well-known for her works in fiction, for her “short, highly imagistic, sparely plotted, stiletto-keen slice of narrative that in her hands glistens in its sheerness,” according to a Booklist reviewer. “For that she has made short story history.”

“The Collected Stories,” published in 2006, contains her previous four volumes. In 1985, she published her first collection, “Reason to Live,” which won the Commonwealth Club of California Silver Medal. Hempel is also the author of “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,” (1991) “Tumble Home” (1998) and in 2005, “The Dog of the Marriage.” She co-edited the 1999 anthology, “Unleashed: Poems by Writer’s Dogs.”

Hempel has won several prestigious literary awards for her work, including the Hobson Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. “The Collected Stories” was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year and a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner Award. Hempel also has received a United States Artists Fellowship and an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2008 she won the Rea Award for the Short Story.

John King earned his PhD in literature from Purdue University in 2003, but he is still a nice person despite his alcoholism.  His fiction has appeared in Gargoyle, Turnrow, Pearl, and Painted Bride Quarterly.  His forthcoming novel Guy Psycho will be published someday, provided the plaid ferret who lives inside his grandmother’s bullet bra will finish dictating it to him.

Petro Moysaenko was born outside of Cleveland, OH, one of the nation’s poorest big cities and the home of American Greetings®. He is of Ukrainian extraction and frequently operates under the improvisational mode of bemusement. He is listening to an extended play record by Billy Bao. He was reading a poem by Richard Brautigan. He is going to say something.

Elsbeth Pancrazi lives in the North-Eastern part of New Jersey, which, during the Jurassic Period, bordered North Africa. Several climate changes later, attracted by the powerful negative capability of the New York metropolitan area, Elsbeth is an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University.

Chris Shortsleeve is writing a novel about kids in Newark.