KGB Bar

Sarah Dragonfly Brown came to writing by way of the theater. After training in high school to be an actress she ran away to Chicago with an underground troupe that wrote all their own plays. When she wanted better female roles, they advised her to write her own play and they’d do it. Five full-length plays and one feature film later, Sarah finds herself writing creative nonfiction in NYC. She is currently working on a memoir calledWack-a-doodle Woman, a story about finding dementia care for her free-spirited mom.

Caitlin Leffel is a writer, editor, and co-author of The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas (2006) and NYC: An Owner’s Manual (2008). This year she officially became a bicoastal writer with the publication of Flair, a guide to effortless and elegant entertaining, which she wrote with Los Angeles interior designer Joe Nye. She has written for Blackbook, Time Out New York, Fashion Week Daily, and Mademoiselle, and holds the dubious distinction of being the last intern at that magazine before it folded. She’s a founding member of the online literary happy hour “Five on Friday,” and is a very recent graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.

Crystal Mandler has recently returned to New York after braving four Chicago winters.  She is at work on her first novel, Shelterbelt, the story of a half-Sioux girl desperate to escape her puritanical mother and the isolation of her remote farm in northeastern Montana, where Crystal was partly raised.  Crystal is a 2010 graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.  She is a computer geek by day, though she’s also been a baker, a blueberry-raker, a statistical analyst, a social anthropologist, a caterer, an editor, and a teacher.