KGB Bar

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Southern California. She is the Poetry Editor of Tin House Magazine and Tin House Books, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. Her poems have been published in Bomb, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. Her publications include: Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999, finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award, PEN/Joyce C. Osterweil Award and Lambda Literary Award (2000)) and Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, the Greenwall Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

JOHN YAU is an art critic, essayist, poet, and prose writer. He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950, shortly after his parents fled Shanghai. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. His collections of poetry include Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002), Forbidden Entries (1996), Berlin Diptychon (1995), Edificio Sayonara (1992), and Corpse and Mirror (1983), a National Poetry Series book selected by John Ashbery. His books of art criticism include The United States of Jasper Johns (1996) and In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (1993). He has also edited Fetish (1998), a fiction anthology. Yau’s honors include the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jerome Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the General Electric Foundation. He currently teaches at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Yau lives in New York City.

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