KGB Bar

Susanna Moore’s newly published novel is The Life of Objects.  Her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, garnered a PEN Hemingway Citation and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.  Joan Didion praised it as “one of those brilliant objects that come along only rarely, all light on clear water, and then one realizes the faster currents underneath, the terrible swiftness of sex and time.” Her other novels include The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, One Last Look, and In the Cut, which was made into a feature film directed by Jane Campion and starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.  Her last novel, The Big Girls, is based on her experience teaching writing in a federal prison in New York.  She is also the author of two books of nonfiction, Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai’i and I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai’i.  She received the 1999 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2006 Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Berlin, and a 2007 Fellowship in Literature from the Asian Cultural Council.  She has taught at Yale University, NYU Graduate School, Princeton University, and the University of Adelaide and been the Creative Writing Teacher at Brooklyn Federal Detention Center.  She lives in New York City.

Dale Peck’s recent novel is The Garden of Lost and Found.  His first novel, Martin and John, was declared “a brilliant debut” by The New York Times.  Two more novels followed: The Law of Enclosures, which was adapted into a feature film by John Greyson starring Sarah Polley and Diane Ladd, and Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, which prompted Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times to write: “All of thirty years old, Mr. Peck has more than fulfilled the promise of his first two novels: he has taken on the same big themes Toni Morrison tried with less success to address in Paradise…and delivered a novel commensurate with his ambitions.” He has published two works of nonfiction, What We Lost and Hatchet Jobs, with its notorious review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil.  Peck has published a literary thriller, Body Surfing, two novels for children, Drift House and The Lost Cities, and one young adult novel, Sprout, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children’s/Young Adult literature and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award in the Children’s and Young Adult Literature category.  Peck lives in New York City with his boyfriend, Lou Peralta, where he teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of the New School.

Marie-Helene Bertino’s debut collection of stories, Safe as Houses, was selected by Jim Shepard for the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award.  Her stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII, North American Review, Mississippi Review, Inkwell, The Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, and West Branch.  She received a Pushcart prize in 2007 and a Pushcart Special Mention in 2011, which is also the year she was chosen as a Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writer’s Fellow.  She hails from Philadelphia and lives in Brooklyn, where for six years she was the associate editor of One Story.