KGB Bar

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.