KGB Bar

BEN LERNER is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. His sonnet sequence, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), won the Hayden Carruth Award, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the year’s 12 best poetry books. His poetry has been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry, New Voices (2008), and 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics (2009).  Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, he earned a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid.  His acclaimed novel Leaving the Atocha Station, draws on this experience abroad.  Lerner is a member of the MFA Program faculty at Brooklyn College.

SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is the author of The Heart is Green From So Much Waiting from Immaculate Disciples Press, City of Moths from Rope-a-Dope Press, and The Photograph from horse less press. Some of his recent or forthcoming work can be found in: SIR!, Sixth Finch, RealPoetik, No Tell Motel, Ekleksographia, Sink Review, and New York Quarterly.  He’s writing a performative book of poetry in which actors play an invisible game of tennis, called The Tennis Court Oath by John Ashbery by Sampson Starkweather, and a meta-pseudo-memoir called Bubba King and the Fruitfly Afterlife. Sam is the founding editor of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press.  After a number of years living alone in the woods, he now lives in Brooklyn.