KGB Bar

Julia LoFaso’s recently completed first novel takes place in 1940s Astoria, Queens, and tells the story of an Italian widow who makes a deal with the Virgin Mary to get her two oldest sons home safe from the war. Julia also lives in Astoria, but in the present day. Her food writing and fiction have appeared in Edible Queens, New York Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. 

Chris Garrecht-Williams was born and raised in New York City, ran away to California for ten years, and moved back home to pursue an MFA, which he finishes tomorrow. He is a bartender, a senior poetry editor at Narrative Magazine, and has poems published now and then.

Rachel Carter is the author of the upcoming young adult novel So Close to You, which will be published this summer through HarperCollins. She is a graduate of Columbia University where she received her MFA. Her nonfiction has appeared in Verbicide Magazine and the Faster Times. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is hard at work on her next YA novel.

What is Faculty Selects?  The first Thursday of each month the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series with writers selected by the faculty. These fresh talents have completed their coursework and are finished with or near to finished with their first books, but do not yet have a book contract and/or an agent. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success, this is your chance to glimpse who you’ll be reading in 2013!

Faculty Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke and Emily Austin.