KGB Bar

Canteen magazine presents the second installment of its new lit series, Outwrite, in which audience members test their writing skills against acclaimed authors. On June 7 two audience members will compete in an audience-judged flash-fiction contest against novelist Matthew Aaron Goodman. While the competitors write, Alexander Chee will read from his latest (not-yet-published) novel. The idea of Outwrite is to encourage a culture of writing; where, for an evening, the aspiring writer can compete on an even level with an established author.

Bios:

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony , the VCCA, Ledig House, the Hermitage and Civitella Ranieri . His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out,The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the New School University, Wesleyan, Amherst College, and in spring 2011 will teach in the Fiction program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Matthew Aaron Goodman’s debut novel, Hold Love Strong, was chosen by Barnes and Noble as a Discover Great New Writers Book and by USA Today as a New Voices Pick. Currently, Matthew lives in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches Multicultural American Literature and Creative Writing at Hunter College, serves as the chief curator for The Museum of Historicity, and coordinates the New York Juvenile Justice Initiative’s Youth Council. He is currently completing his second novel.