KGB Bar

The Hunter College MFA program presents this bi-annual alumni reading. Faculty members Peter Carey, Louise DeSalvo, Nathan Englander, Kathryn Harrison, Eva Hoffman, Jan Heller Levi, Donna Masini, Colum McCann and Tom Sleigh choose alumni readers from Hunter College’s MFA programs in fiction, poetry and memoir.

Please join us for the Fall 2009 reading featuring, Vanessa Manko (Fiction, 2008), Maya Funaro (Poetry, 2008) and Jason Porter (Fiction, 2008).

Vanessa Manko earned her MFA in Fiction from Hunter College (2008). After training in ballet at the North Carolina School of the Arts and dancing professionally with the Charleston Ballet Theater, Vanessa returned to school to earn a B.A. in English from the University of Connecticut. She went on to receive her M.A. in dance studies and cultural history from NYU’s Gallatin School. In addition to writing fiction, Vanessa writes about dance. She is the former Dance Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, and has written articles and reviews for Dance Magazine, NYFA’s Current, Dance Teacher, and Dance Research Journal. Vanessa is currently completing her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn Heights.

Maya Funaro’s chapbook Setting in Motion was released in 2009 by Fox Point Press. She completed her MFA in poetry at Hunter College in May of 2008. Her poetry has appeared in Ekleksographia, and Ology, the Graduate English journal of Hunter College. She holds a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University and has studied printmaking, bookbinding and letterpress printing in Providence, Bologna and New York. Born and raised in South Jersey, she currently makes her home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

After a brief career as an online news editor and a less brief non-career as a rock musician, Jason Porter completed an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College in 2008. He has since written a short novel titled Why Are You So Sad? and is hard at work on a new novel about a fallen celebrity boxer. Despite a perfectly happy childhood in southeastern Michigan, he is even happier to now call Brooklyn his home, where he is gradually aging along with his girlfriend and their two nearly perfect terrier mutts.