KGB Bar

New Fiction from students of the CUNY Writers’ Institute

The Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center is pleased to announce a reading from four promising authors of its fiction class.

The Writers’ Institute is an intensive writers’ workshop led by prominent New York editors, including Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Christopher Cox, a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, George Andreou, senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Jonathan Freeman, editor of Granta literary magazine.

“This was my second year at the Writer’s Institute and once again I found the work we discussed consistently original, various and challenging,” says Galassi. “I had a wonderful experience working with these exciting emerging writers and it’s an honor to be able to introduce a few of these fresh voices to a wider audience,” Galassi says.

André Aciman, director of the Writers’ Institute and author of “Out of Egypt: A Memoir and the collection of essays False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory,” will present the reading, introducing the work of four new authors, all fellows of the Writers’ Institute classes of 2010 – 2011 and 2011 – 2012.

Reading from their works-in-progress are Sultana Banulescu, Thomas Lin, Destanie McAllister and Caroline Seklir. The reading will be at KGB Bar at 85 East 4th Street on March 16, 2012 at 7 pm. This event is free to the public.

Writer Bios:

Sultana Banulescu is a Ph. D. candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the 2010-2011 recipient of the Randolph Braham Dissertation Fellowship in Eastern European History and Holocaust Studies. Her short story, “Beggars and Thieves,” was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction by Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry.

Thomas Lin is a senior producer at The New York Times and teaches at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. He edits the Scientist at Work blog and has written articles on tennis, game-based military simulators, ping pong, and the open science movement. He is working on a novel about the vagaries of friendship.

Destanie McAllister’s fiction has appeared in Lit and Wordriot. She was also published in a newsletter of the Cognitive Science Society while obtaining her master’s degree in philosophy. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Caroline Seklir is a native New Yorker who recently earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. For two years she taught University Writing at Columbia as a Teaching Fellow in the Undergraduate Writing Program.  She is a contributor to The Brooklyn Rail and offManahattan.com. Caroline writes short stories and novels. She is currently at work on a novel about soil, teenagers and longing in upstate New York.