KGB Bar

E. J. Levy’s fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, The Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, The New York Times, and Best American Essays and have earned a Pushcart Prize, a Nelson Algren Award, a scholarship to Bread Loaf and twice been named among the year’s 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories, among other honors. She is editor of Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, which won the Lambda Literary Award. Her debut story collection, Love, In Theory, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and will be released in October 2012.

“There is nothing theoretical about my love for Love, in Theory, a brilliant debut collection by E. J. Levy. Sad, funny, and always wise, Levy’s stories reveal truths about how we love and lose, trust and betray, with an intelligence that takes my breath away. I’ll be returning to these wonderful stories again and again.”—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Eric Sasson received his M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and has taught fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop. His short story collection, “Margins of Tolerance,” was the 2011 Tartt First Fiction Award runner-up and is forthcoming from Livingston Press in May 2012. His story “Floating” was a finalist for the Robert Olen Butler prize. Other recent publication credits include stories forthcoming in Explosion Proof as well as recently published in BLOOM, Nashville Review, The Puritan, Liquid Imagination, Alligator Juniper, Trans, The Ledge, MARY magazine and THE2NDHAND, among others. He’s honored to have been awarded a 2010 residency fellowship to the Anderson Center in Minnesota, where he completed an edit of his first novel. He has also been awarded a Hambidge residency for August 2012. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. www.ericsassonnow.com
He reads from his book: Margins of Tolerance

“At times disturbing, at times challenging, but always immensely readable, these stories of cultural exchange and cultural misunderstanding are all masterfully rendered. Eric Sasson is a seriously gifted writer who has uncovered a powerful, haunting truth, that we only know we’ve reached the margins of tolerance when we come face-to-face with the intolerable.”
—JUSTIN TORRES, author of We the Animals


“Margins of Tolerance is thoughtful, funny, and fearless. Eric Sasson gives us an ensemble of slick, saucy, often evasive characters and strips them naked one by one. He’s an outstanding writer who shows us that judgment and unconditional love can indeed coexist—not peacefully, but beautifully.”


—ALEXANDER YATES, author of Moondogs

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Stephanie Dickinson was raised on an Iowa farm and now lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil. Other works include Corn Goddess and Road of Five Churches. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Non-required Reading and New Stories from the South (Best of 2008 and 2009). She won New Delta Review’s 2011 Matt Clark Fiction prize judged by Susan Straight. She is an associate editor at Mudfish, and with Rob Cook edits Skidrow Penthouse.

Jen Knox is the author of To Begin Again, winner of the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book award in short fiction and the 2011 Readers Favorite award in women’s fiction. Her short story, “Types of Circus”, was recently chosen for Wigleaf’s 2012 Top 50 list. Jen’s essays and short fiction can be read in Annalemma, Bluestem, Gargoyle, Narrative, Short Story America, Thrush, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in San Antonio and is currently at work on a novel. Jen’s website is here: http://www.jenknox.com.

JP Reese earned an MFA from The University of Memphis.  Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and writer interviews have been published or are forthcoming in many online and print journals such as Metazen, Blue Fifth Review, A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen Extraordinary Things, and The Pinch.  Reese is a poetry editor for THIS Literary Magazine, www.thiszine.org, and Associate Poetry Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, www.connotationpress.com.  Reese’s poetry chapbook Final Notes was published by Naked Mannekin Press in spring, 2012.  Reese’s flash fiction has won the Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize and her poetry won The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis.  Her published work can be read at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty, jpreesetoo.wordpress.com.

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Judith Vollmer’s fifth book of poetry, The Water Books, was published by Autumn House Press earlier this year.  She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and has received the Brittingham, Cleveland State, and Center for Book Arts publication prizes. Vollmer teaches at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation.  She lives in Pittsburgh and is a founding editor of the poetry journal 5 AM.

Lori Jakiela is the author of a poetry collection—Spot the Terrorist! (Turning Point Books, 2012)—and a memoir, Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette, 2006). Her poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, KGB BarLit, 5 AM and elsewhere. She spent seven years as a flight attendant based in New York City and often writes about this. She now lives outside of Pittsburgh and teaches in the writing programs at Chatham University and The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Her website is www.lorijakielawritesbooks.com. 

Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction.  In 2009, he published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York’s top books of 2009.  His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award.

Grace Krilanovich is the author of The Orange Eats Creeps which was selected as one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Year (2010). Grace was also honored as one of the “Top 5 Under 35” by the National Book Foundation.

Rachel Sherman’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Fence, Open City, Conjunctions, and n+1, among other publications. Her first book, The First Hurt, was short‐listed for The Story Prize and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named one of the 25 Books to Remember in 2006 by the New York Public Library.

Julia Holmes is the author of Meeks of which Jim Crusoe of the New York Times said, “It’s a book whose singular vision keeps returning to me at odd moments, one of the most original and readable novels that’s come my way in a long time.” Publishers Weekly said, “A highly imaginative debut finds a stark Darwinian logic in a rigidly hierarchical society. . . . Holmes has fashioned a terrifying and utterly convincing world in which the perfect human being is one stripped of all illusions.”

Leland Pitts‐Gonzalez is the author of The Blood Poetry (Raw Dog Screaming Press, August 2012) and has published fiction in many literary journals including Open City, Fence, Dark Sky Magazine, Drunken Boat, Monkey Bicycle, and the KGB Bar Lit Journal.  He is a fiscally-sponsored artist of the New York Foundation for the Arts for the event-series Phantasmagoria: Faith-Healing at the Slaughterhouse.

Michael Bakkensen is an actor and collaborator on Phantasmagoria.  He has extensive experience in Theater, most recently in Noises Off on Broadway, in Film (Memoria Mortalis at Sundance), and on Television (Law & Order).  He received his MFA in Theater from the University of California at San Diego and BA in English/Theater from Yale University.

Daniel Gorrell works as a Director, Director of Photography, Editor, and collaborator on Phantasmagoria.  His films have appeared at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Other Cinema, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, P.B.S. and M.T.V. Japan.

Phantasmagoria is a sponsored project of Artspire, a Program of the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Copyright © 2012, Leland Pitts-Gonzalez.

Deni Béchard was born in British Columbia to French Canadian and American parents and grew up throughout Canada and the United States. He has also traveled and lived in over thirty countries. His first novel, Vandal Love, (2006, Doubleday Canada) has been published in French and Arabic, and won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, both for the best first book in Canada and for the best overall first book in the British Commonwealth. It was also nominated for Le Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre Montréal / La Presse, 2008, as well as the French version of Canada Reads (Le Combat des Livres, 2009). On four occasions, he has been a recipient of Canada Council and Québec Arts Council Grants, and he has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Jentel, the Edward Albee Foundation, Ledig House, the Anderson Center and Vermont Studio Center, among others. His articles, stories and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan. When not traveling, he divides his time between Cambridge, New York City and Montréal. He reads from his memoir Cures for Hunger.

“In Vandal Love D.Y. Béchard has re-invented the generational novel with innovative brilliance. The book has all the quirky depth of a great HBO series and a line-to-line literary energy that is very rare. This is an enormously impressive debut by a clearly gifted writer.” Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain

“Over a vast yet beautifully coherent canvas, Vandal Love follows the panic and privilege of human longing through an amazing coalition of loneliness and adaptation. These characters – injured but unbowed, broken but enduring – introduce a gifted new writer. Béchard’s surety of voice and confident narrative span declare a first rate novel and an eloquent debut.”
Commonwealth Judging Panel, 2007
“Though Béchard has a journalism background, this fiction debut,unfolding in punchy prose, recalls Márquez with a French-Canadian twist.” -Publishers Weekly (starred review of Vandal Love)

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

A shrink, a sign-language interpreter, an ex- nun, and one fiercely happy broad walked into a bar… and read from their books:

MIINDY GREENSTEIN will read from The House on Crash Corner (Greenpoint Press, with Foreword by New York Times columnist David Brooks), which was one of O: The Oprah Magazine’s 10 Books to Pick Up. A clinical psychologist and writer, her personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, SELF, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Ducts.com, etc. Mindy was selected as one of the featured authors at the 19th Annual Festival of Women Authors in Irvine, CA.

ARNINE CUMSKY WEISS will read from her novel, The Undefeated. She’s a teacher of English as a second language and a sign language interpreter who has worked in the field of Deafness for over thirty years. She is the author of five books: her sixth book, She Ain’t Heavy, will be out this fall.

MAURA MULLIGAN will read from Call of the Lark, published by Greenpoint Press on May 10—exactly 54 years after she arrived in America from County Mayo, Ireland, where she worked on the family farm, danced onstage, and served pints in a pub. In NYC, she became a telephone operator, then a nun for sixteen years. She was also a teacher of English, Irish language and dance. Her writing has appeared in The Irish Times, Irish America, The Irish Echo, Ducts.org, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

ELLEN SCHECTER will read from Fierce Joy, the latest Greenpoint Press release. She’s written many children’s books and collaborated on numerous multi-award winning TV series, including Reading Rainbow and The Magic School Bus. Her first novel, The Big Idea (Hyperion), won the Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Check out her latest review on FabOverFifty and a recent podcast @ dr.paulchristomd.com.

The Stephen King novel that was so bad that he threw it in the trash behind a run-down McDonald’s in Bangor, Maine.  But four writers fished it out, wiped off the Big Mac grease stains, put the pages in order and are proud to present it to you.

Each writer will be reading the section they created. These writers are:

SAARA DUTTON
Saara Dutton is the gin-soaked host and producer of a long-running variety show called Mama D’s Arts Bordello; showcasing writers, musicians, comics and burlesque dancers. She is also a writer who has been published in The New York Times, The New York Observer, Salon, Bust Magazine and Ducts Webzine. She’s an avid fan of Stephen King, even though he’s often robbed her of sleep.

DANIEL GUZMÁN
Daniel Guzmán is a writer of fiction, film reviews, essays, and articles. His work has appeared in the New York Press, Cinespect, the L Magazine’s Literary Upstart Reading Series, Mama D’s Arts Bordello, Rosebud Magazine, and Rio Grande Review. He has read at such well-known New York venues as The Slipper Room, Happy Ending Lounge, Bowery Poetry Club, and The Cornelia Street Café. He is known as the Surrealist Fictionario.

MICHAEL MAIELLO
Michael Maiello is an author, playwright, and a sometime stand-up comic and performer.  With Godlight Theatre Company composer Andrew Recino’s he is co-author of the musical Principia, How I Found Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her, premiered by Godlight in 2003. He has also had plays produced, staged or read at La Mama, Dixon Place, The Joseph Papp Memorial Public Theatre and The Abingdon Theatre in New York.  He appears frequently at Mama D’s Arts Bordello. He also writes a weekly Op-Ed column for The Daily, a tablet publication produced by News Corp.

PETER OLSON
Peter Olson has written for, performed in and been laughed at near a number of venues across New York city, including the Upright Citizens
Brigade Theatre and Mama D’s Arts Bordello. In the online world his work can be found on MatadorTravel.com and SpikeTV.com (if you Google hard enough), and he is a regular contributor to (and voice-actor for) Marvel.com’s stop-motion animated series “Marvel Super Heroes What The?!”

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Last reading of the series until fall.

Liars’ League NYC is a monthly live short-fiction event featuring professional actors reading original short stories by both up-and-coming and well-established writers.  Or, as we like to put it: writers write, actors read, audience listens, everybody wins. We’ve been going in London since 2007, and we’re excited to have found a second home in New York at KGB.

Each of our events is themed - if you’re interested in either submitting or reading a story, please see www.liarsleaguenyc.com for full details. 

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Featuring:

Taylor M. Polites is a novelist living in Providence, Rhode Island with his small Chihuahua, Clovis. Polites’ first novel, The Rebel Wife, was published in February 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and BA in History and French from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2009, he was awarded the Norris Church Mailer Fellowship from Wilkes University. He has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, New York City, St. Louis and the Deep South. He has covered arts and news for a variety of local newspapers and magazines, including the Cape Codder, InNewsWeekly, Bird’s Eye View (the in-flight magazine of CapeAir), artscope Magazine and Provincetown Arts Magazine.

Richard Uhlig is the author of the Knopf-published novels, Last Dance At The Frosty Queen and Boy Minus Girl.  He is also the screenwriter of the award-winning film Dead Simple, starring James Caan and Patricia Richardson, as well as Kept, starring Ice-T.  He recently wrote, produced and directed the short film comedy Can’t Dance, starring Karen Lynn Gorny.  The film won Founder’s Choice Award at the Queens World Film Festival. Richard lives in New York with his wife and two small children.

Sandee Gertz Umbach is a poet and writer from Western Pennsylvania, currently residing near Pittsburgh.  Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals, including Poet Lore, The Ledge, Gargoyle, and The Green Mountains Review. She has been the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship grant and is a Sandburg-Livesay Award Winner. Her recently released poetry collection, The Pattern Maker’s Daughter, (published by Bottom Dog Press) is set in the industrial steel city of Johnstown,Pennsylvania and reflects coming of age themes with a strong narrative sense of place and landscape.  Geology, geography, weather, and even neuroscience collide as this “Girl Interrupted” speaker tells her stories from the heart of one of America’s colorful working class cities.

Patricia Florio spent 17 years as a certified professional court reporter in Brooklyn’s federal court system when she decided to change careers.  She’s had this constant buzzing muse prompting her to write since she was a teenager.  Her first book “My Two Mothers” was published in August 2011.  She has gotten excellent reviews.(see it on Amazon.com) She’s married to her husband Ralph for 40 years and they live in the Historic Victorian town of Ocean Grove on the Jersey Shore.  She received her undergrad from Rutgers in Liberal Studies and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University.

Brian Fanelli’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Inkwell Journal, Harpur Palate, Solstice Literary Magazine, Word Riot, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Boston Literary Magazine, The Portland Review, San Pedro River Review, Chiron Review, Blue Lotus Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Front Man, a series of narrative rock ‘n roll poems, and his first full-length collection of poems will be published in the summer of 2013 by Unbound Content. Brian also writes poetry book reviews for PANK. He has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Wilkes University and teaches creative writing at Keystone College.

Neptune Zugzwa is a writer from New Orleans. His work includes tales of the surreal and irreverent with strong social and philosophical themes. His work has appeared in both Le Chat Noir short story collections, Tales of Blood and Glory and Drinking with Papa Legba.

Jacob Tomsky is writing a memoir about his time working in the luxury hotel business, from housekeeping to front desk, from New Orleans to New York.  The book will be an unprecedented look behind-the-curtains, detailing every aspect of the business, from the humorous to the horrific.  The memoir will be published by Doubleday, November 20th, 2012.  Jake is also the President and Founder of Short Story Thursdays, a weekly, email-based short story club.  Email shurtyourlazymouthandread@gmail.com to join.  He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Kristin Dombek writes essays about religion, pop culture, politics, and life in New York.  Recent work can be found in n+1, The Daily, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and Make Mine a Double, an anthology of essays about women and drinking.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and is a founding member of the Brooklyn Writers Collaborative.  She lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Princeton Writing Program.

Matthew D’Abate is the founder and creative director of Le Chat Noir, a film, music, and literary arts collective based in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Thieves Jargon, Dogmatika, Cherry Bleeds, Foliate Oak Literary Journal, and Word Riot. He is the film critic for You’re Beautiful, New York, and is the bartender-at-large of the successful blog, The Bartender Knows.

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Sirius XM, WNYC, Manhattan Monologue Slam Champ) invites some of NY’s top writers and storytellers to share true, bizarre tales about their lives. There’s live accordion music, a challenging trivia game, and a free wine giveaway where one lucky audience member will walk away with their very own bottle of Sideshow Sauce! Tonight’s stellar lineup includes stories from:

John Flynn (UCB Theater, winner of Backstage Bistro Award for Outstanding Comedy)
Caitlin Brodnick (The Moth, host of “Shut Up” storytelling series)
Evan Morgenstern (host of Switzerland Neutral Comedy)

with music by Dr. Michelle-Leona Godin

Time Out New York “Critic’s Pick”
New York Daily News “Editor’s Pick”

Join us for the second Open Mic Night presented by the New York City chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. Readers will include established authors as well as those who are new and up-and-coming.

The Women’s National Book Association was formed in 1917-before the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote-by women booksellers who were excluded from other bookselling organizations. Today, it is a broad-based non-profit organization of women and men working in every strata of the publishing industry, with chapters all over the country. 

Writers from all over the country respond to the question, “What does it mean to be a grown-up?” with essays, short stories, charts, letters, and at least one picture book.

Meg Bashwiner is a writer, performer and co-artistic director of the New York Neo-Futurists. The New York Neo-Futurists are an ensemble of wildly creative theater makers best known for their hit show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind running every weekend in NYC. More info at www.nynf.org. Meg is a writer, performer, designer and producer whose work has been seen at The Monkey, The Kraine Theater, HERE Arts Center, Theater for the New City, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater and Chicago’s Neo Futurarium.

Jeffrey Cranor writes, performs, and directs (mostly short) plays for the New York Neo-Futurists and their long-running show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. He co-wrote & performed in 2008’s full-length Neo-Futurist show (Not) Just a Day Like Any Other, for which he won a NY Innovative Theater award for Outstanding Ensemble. That same year, his 10-minute play I’m Not Here (featuring the NY Neos) was chosen for performance in Occurence at Ars Nova, alongside original work by Tommy Smith, Reggie Watts, and Mike Daisey. In 2009, Jeffrey co-wrote and directed Jillian Sweeney’s solo show This Could Be It at The Chocolate Factory. And in 2011, Jeffrey performed in and co-wrote What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us with Joseph Fink. .

Joseph Fink is a writer and editor who lives, surprisingly, in Brooklyn. He oversees just about everything at Commonplace Books, and is looking forward to moving it forward with ever more ambitious and exciting projects. He is a former staff writer for the popular comedy website SomethingAwful.com, and he also does theater occasionally, having recently performed in and co-wrote What the Time Traveler Will Tell Us with Jeffrey Cranor.

Kevin R. Free is a writer-performer who’s told stories on NPR, Dana Rossi’s the Soundtrack Series, and on the mainstage at The Moth. An alumnus of the New York Neo-Futurists, he wrote over 60 plays for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, and his full-length Neo-Futurist play, (Not) Just a Day Like Any Other, co-written with Christopher Borg, Jeffrey Cranor, and Eevin Hartsough, was the recipient of the NY IT Award for Outstanding Ensemble in 2009. One of NYTheatre.com’s People of the year in 2010, his full-length plays, Face Value and A Raisin in the Salad: Black Plays for White People, were published by indietheaternow.com.  To read more of his thoughts, visit him @kevinrfree on Twitter, or at kevinrfree.com.

Daniel McCoy is a New York-based writer and performer whose plays, including Eli and Cheryl Jump, Group, and The Downtown Daylight Project, have been produced in NYC and around the country. Other plays, including Sympathy, Sheila St. George and the World’s Farthest Falling Man, and Goddamn Gorgeous Mess, have received readings and workshops as well. As a member of the New York Neo-Futurists, he has produced over 70 short plays for the late-night show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and received a New York Innovative Theatre award nomination for Outstanding Performance Art Production for (un)afraid, which he co-wrote and performed in at The Living Theatre in 2010. His short story, “DISSIPATION?”, was published in A Commonplace Book of the Weird: The Untold Stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Daniel is from Portland, Oregon, and spent a healthy number of years in Los Angeles, where he is a member-at-large of the award-winner Elephant Theatre Company. He recently received his BA in English from Brooklyn College.

Rob Neill is a founding member and the Managing Director of the New York Neo-Futurists, and he has performed Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind around the country since 1995. Rob has worked at the Ontological in the Incubator and Tiny Theater, created original pieces for PS 122’s Avant-Garde-Arama and Vampire Cowboys’ Revamped produced The 6-Pack and Apocalypse Neo at the Kraine, and co-created Laika Dog in Space. Rob continues to write and perform in Too Much Light..., works some days in the commercial industry, and has several of his plays and poems published. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the National Theater Institute, and Grinnell College.

An Evening with Coffee House Press Authors

Ben Lerner reads from his novel: Leaving the Atocha Station

Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages, and Rain Taxi, and he has released three albums under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, is a companion album to this novel and will be released in May 2012. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and his son, Jackson.

“Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing, and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit. Dylan Hicks knows his music and his prose is a song in itself. He’s given light to the shuttered and boarded parts of life.” —S A M L I P S Y T E
“As a novel, Dylan Hicks’s Boarded Windows takes a sly, questioning, sidelong glance that keeps both the narrator and his listeners—because this novel is whispered, confided, mused, as much as it is written—continually off balance. As a work of American iconography, it ’s a continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man.”—GR E I L MA R C US
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Brian Evenson reads from his collection: Windye
Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York’s Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellow- ship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for “ Windeye,” Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Department.
“Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.” —J ONATHAN L ETHEM
“Laughter can be an effective tool of the horror writer, and Evenson is its finest practitioner.” —TIME OUT CHICAGO

“A backwoods Bret Easton Ellis.”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Diana Cage’s first serious writing job was as editor of the notorious lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs. Five years in. she couldn’t take it anymore and moved to New York to become host of The Diana Cage Show on Sirius XM. That only lasted a few years, just long enough for her to fall in love and move to Philadelphia, where she now teaches writing at The University of the Arts. She is the author of several popular and outrageous books on sex and dating, including her brand new book Mind Blowing Sex which has just been published by Seal Press.

Melissa Febos is the author of WHIP SMART, a critically acclaimed memoir about her years as a professional dominatrix that Kirkus Reviews said, “expertly captures grace within depravity."Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon, Dissent, The Southeast Review, The New York Times, Bitch Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, among many other places, and she has been profiled in venues ranging from the cover of the New York Post to NPR’s Fresh Air. A 2010 & 2011 MacDowell Colony fellow, she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, and NYU, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. For five years, she has co-curated and hosted the Mixer Reading and Music Series, and she is currently at work on a novel and a screenplay.

Jessie Male is a recent graduate of the MFA program in nonfiction at Hunter College. Not one for change, she still frequents the English department, only now as a teacher of Rhetoric & Composition. In past lives she has worked as a high school creative writing teacher, a grant writer, an assistant to the colloid and surfactant king of America, and as an editor at the number two grocery trade magazine in the country. She is co-host of the performance series bad date great story, and she is completing her first memoir.

Anne Elliott is a NYC spoken word veteran with stage credits including The Whitney Museum, PS122, and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s.  Her fiction has appeared most recently in the Bellevue Literary Review and R.KV.R.Y magazine.

Curated by Richie Fine and Adam LaMothe

Opening Reception: May 16, 9-11PM
Show Dates: May 16-June 26

Kraine Gallery presents The End is Nigh, curated by Richie Fine and Adam LaMothe. Featuring art by Nic Borelli, Richie Fine, Nicolas Holiber, Adam LaMothe, John Lark, Kaitlyn Stubbs, and Allison Simmons.

This group show features new work created by an inventive group of emerging artists from the New York Academy of Art. Inspired by their impending graduation and their prophetic visual abilities, this “Masterful” grouping of work presents a view of the world that is as uncertain and unsettling as the very careers these artists are beginning.

Opening a mere two days before commencement, please join us as we celebrate these graduates’ first uncertain step out of academia into the cold, unfaithful, and unforgiving world.

21+ only
www.krainegallery.com
https://www.facebook.com/KraineGallery

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

Karen Heuler’s stories have been published in over 60 literary and speculative magazines, anthologies and “Year’s Best” collections, including the forthcoming The Year’s Best SF #17. Her most recent novel is The Made-up Man, published by Livingston Press

ChiZine Publications will publish her short story collection, The Inner City, early next year.

&

Victor LaValle’s novel, Big Machine, won the Shirley Jackson Award, the American Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His next novel, The Devil in Silver, will be published in August 2012 by Speigel & Grau.

Rajesh Paramaswaram reads from his collection: I Am an Executioner”

“To claim that an author has written inventive stories about love conjures up many possibilities, but none will compare to the fertile imaginings of Rajesh Parameswaran. His debut collection, I Am an Executioner, is filled with the voices of astonishing characters—a misunderstood tiger, a strip mall con man who opens a medical clinic with only library texts to guide him, an executioner, a surveillance agent, a pompous railway manager, and more—whose pitch-perfect stories recalibrate the notion of love and power with dark humor and unbearable tenderness.”
—Walter Mosley

“I Am an Executioner is intelligent and hilarious and wildly imaginative. Parameswaran explores with great delicacy that fraught line between provincial life and modern times. There are traces of Chekhov in his writing. These stories have the power to endure.”

—Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of When Skateboards Will Be Free
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Catherine Chung is a Granta New Voice, and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She is a member of the birdsong collective, and is on the advisory board of Paris Press. She currently lives in New York City. She reads from her novel: Forgotten Country. Forgotten Country is an Indie Next Pick, a Publishers’ Weekly Pick, Bookpage’s Top Fiction Pick for March, an O Magazine Must-Read, and an Elle Readers’ Prize Pick.

“Luminous and surprising…. Chung brings a gentle, special gravity to this Korean family’s tale of endurance… Her voice is fresh, her material rich, and “Forgotten Country” is an impressive, memorable debut.”
Mary Pols, San Francisco ChronicleCatherine Chung reads from her debut novel: Forgotten Country

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Daniel B. Meltzer is a playwright, fiction writer, and journalist. He has won the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes for his stories, and a New York Newspaper Association Award for his columns. His plays have been staged across the U.S. as well as in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  His stories, memoirs, essays and poems have appeared in many journals, magazines, and newspapers here and abroad.  Daniel has been a newspaper editor, a TV news writer, a comedy writer, a speechwriter, a college professor, and a community organizer. He lives in Manhattan.  The story LES IS MOR is from his new collection, OUTSIDERS, published this year.
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Like Michel Foucault, Anne Posten describes herself as a Nietzschean.  She also describes herself variously as a translator, a writer, a musician, a mediocre but enthusiastic tennis player, a veteran barista/bartender, and an excellent cook, so it’s hard to know what to believe, really.  She most certainly lives in Astoria, while in (hot) pursuit of an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College.  Her first book-length translation from the German, This Beautiful Place, by Tankred Dorst, was recently published by Hanging Loose Press. 

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Sarah Enelow was raised in Central Texas and May 12th is her six-year anniversary of moving to New York, where she currently works at a string instrument shop. Sarah’s writing has been published by Not For Tourists among other travel websites and a couple of very obscure literary magazines. She has an infatuation with travel, which led her to do an internship in Moscow, a Fulbright Grant in rural Argentina, and a month-long stint in Beijing. 

Sarah Brunstad is an uprooted Tennessean writing her way into New York City. She studied English at the University of Tennessee, where she won second place in the university’s fiction prize. While working on her master’s degree at Fordham University, she is bending genres in her young adult novel tentatively titled Follow the Yellow Brick Road.  This summer, she’ll be working on a modernized graphic adaptation of Britomart’s tale in The Faerie Queene. Sarah’s work has been published in BeanSwitch, Polaris, and The Rumpus, and she is a staff member of CURA, Fordham’s literary magazine.

Jessica Denzer is an undergraduate student at Fordham University currently working on an English degree with a concentration in creative writing. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, she originally moved to New York to attend acting school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Discovering a passion for words during scene study, Jessica transferred to Fordham to focus on writing. She is currently working on a short story collection and preparing to apply for graduate school. This is the first time Jessica will be reading at KGB.

Catharine Kane is about to complete her undergraduate degree in English Literature at Fordham University in the Bronx. Starting in the fall she will be teaching high school English in eastern North Carolina through Teach for America. When not curled up in a corner writing, she spends her time with the amazing young women at the Rosedale Center for Girls in the South Bronx. To read her rants about everything from secret messages in Harry Potter to the inherent awesomeness of Disney princesses, check out her blog, http://plotsmiths.blogspot.com/.

Kevin Hart is an English MA student at Fordham University, where he teaches English composition and French grammar.  This fall, he will begin work on a PhD in English, French and Russian literature at UC San Diego.

Matt Petronzio is a poet and journalist living in Manhattan. He is a creative writing student at Fordham University, where he has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Ully Hirsch/Robert F. Nettleton Poetry Prize. He recently completed a chapbook, “Asleep With Locusts,” as his thesis. His work has been published most recently in NAP Magazine, and he is an editor for CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action. This fall, Matt will begin his MFA candidacy in poetry at Hunter College.

Amelia Rafael studies English at Fordham University and was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.  Although she went on a brief haitus during her senior year in high school, she began writing poetry in junior high and is happy to have taken up the practice again recently. Although an English major, she is taking elective science courses in order to gain admission into Optometry School. Amelia does research at the Pfizer laboratory at the New York Botanical Gardens twice a week.

Tessa Ramsay will graduate from Fordham University this month with an English major and Creative Writing minor. Her favorite form of creative writing is the short story because she finds the freedom of creating lives from scratch to be both challenging and thrilling. Next year, she will be pursuing her Master’s Degree in Adolescent English Education at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education. As a future high school English and creative writing teacher, she hopes to inspire her students to find their unique writing voices and explore the world of fiction and poetry, which she has come to love so much.

Chris Ready is a senior at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus. He will be graduating on May 18 with a major in philosophy and minors in English and Spanish.  He was published in CURA earlier this year. This is his first time reading at the KGB Bar. Chris plans to remain in New York City after graduation, and looks forward to establishing himself as a writer as soon as possible.

Veronica Szczygiel is graduating this May with a Master’s in English and American Literature at Fordham University. She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, in May of 2010 with a degree in English and Education. Currently, Veronica is an English teacher at Marymount Middle School. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is right across the street from Marymount, is an indispensable source of inspiration. Besides education, Veronica’s passion is creative writing. She writes poetry and is working on a middle-grade children’s novel. Her work has previously appeared in Ampersand, The Tablet, Echoes, and in Columbia University’s Slavic Magazine The Birch.

Reminder that attendees must be at least 21 years old.

Patricia McCormick, a finalist for the National Book Award, is the author of the forthcoming novel, Never Fall Down, based on the true story of an 11-year-old boy who survived the Khmer Rouge by playing music in the Killing Fields. Patricia has authored four critically acclaimed novels: Purple Heart, a suspenseful psychological novel that explores the killing of a 10-year-old boy in Iraq; Sold, a sensitive, moving account of sexual trafficking; My Brother’s Keeper, a realistic view of teenage substance abuse; and Cut, an intimate portrait of one teenager’s struggle with self-injury. Her books have earned multiple honors, including a Best 100 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly for Sold and an American Library Association Best Book for Teenagers for Cut. Patricia was a 2004 New York Foundation on the Arts Fellow. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and lives Manhattan. 

Paul Griffin’s highly anticipated new novel is the mystery Burning Blue. His previous novel, Stay with Me, was named a 2011 Best Book by Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal. His second novel, The Orange Houses, was an American Library Association Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults, an International Reading Association 2010 Notable Book for a Global Society, a Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Book of 2009, and an Amelia Bloomer Project Award winner. He is also the author of Ten Mile River. Paul started working with at-risk, incarcerated and special needs teens in 1989, with a concentration in conflict resolution workshops aimed at stemming the spread of violence, substance abuse, and HIV/AIDS among young adults. These days his workshops focus on helping young men and women tell their life stories as they reach out to counselors, judges, admissions officers and potential employers. Paul lives, writes, and trains dogs in New York City.

Neesha Meminger’s latest novel, Into the Wise Dark, is a time-travel fantasy that further cements her critical success. Shine, Coconut Moon, her first novel, made the Smithsonian’s Notable Books for Children list and was selected as one of the Top 100 Books of 2009 by the New York Public Library’s Stuff for the Teen Age. It was also nominated as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association as well as the online CYBILS award. Her second novel, Jazz in Love, was picked as a top YA selection by the Pennsylvania School Librarians’ Association and was selected for Bookslut’s Recommended Summer Reading List. She has taught literature and creative writing courses to undergraduate freshmen in New York, served as a board member for many arts and cultural organizations, and counseled women and youth in crisis. An independent filmmaker, Neesha’s movies have screened at international film festivals. She lives in New York City.

Bil Wright’s acclaimed recent novel, Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy, “gives voice, complexity, and heart” to a gay 16-year-old who dreams of becoming a famous makeup artist. Bil’s first novel, When the Black Girl Sings, was a Junior Library Guild selection, and his third novel, Sunday You Learn How to Box, was a Booklist’s best adult books for teens, a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age, a Coretta Scott King Celebrating the Dream Book, and featured on the American Library Association’s list of Books for Gay Teens. He is also the author of the novel, One Foot in Love. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in several anthologies, including Shade, Black Like Us, The Road Before Us, and Black Silk. An associate professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bil lives in New York City.

NYU-SCPS Programs in Writing and Speech Present The 2012 Spring Term STUDENT READING

Featuring

JUANITA BOBBITT

DENNIS JAMES

KEITH McDERMOTT

CHRIS SHIRLEY

And

HELEN WAN

In the final event presented this spring by NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and literary venue KGB Bar, five students from the NYU-SCPS writing tutorial program will read from their work.

Please join us in supporting this term’s featured student readers.  Family and friends are welcome to attend.

Juanita Bobbitt’s first novel is Beyond Where the Eye Can See, a historical rendering of a mixed-race marriage in late nineteenth-century Barbados that follows three generations as they immigrate to New York.  Previously she published two non-fiction books.

Dennis James has published in Mobius magazine, Summerset Review, Struggle Magazine, and MacGuffin.  He is working on a collection of short stories about people and their work.

Keith McDermott is the author of Acqua Calda (Carroll & Graf at Avalon Press), winner of a 1999 In Our Own Write Award.

Chris Shirley is the author of Playing by the Book (due in March 2013 from Magnus Books), in which a fundamentalist boy preacher falls for a male classmate.

Helen Wan’s novel, The Firm Outing (to be published by St. Martin’s Press during Summer 2013) is about a Chinese-American lawyer and the glass ceiling.

Matt Hart is a co-founder and editor of Forklift Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Butcher Shop, The Canary, and Ploughshares, among other journals, and can be seen in such online journals as Diagram, H_NGM_N, and Typo. A chapbook of his work, Revelated, was just published this Fall by Hollyridge Press. His first full-length book of poems, Who’s Who Vivid, is forthcoming from Slope Editions. He teaches writing and aesthetics at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Macgregor Card is a poet, translator and bibliographer living in Jackson Heights, NYC. His first collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, was the winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poet Series. A new chapbook, The Archers, is forthcoming from Song Cave. With Andrew Maxwell he was co-editor of The Germ: A Journal of Poetic Research, from 1997-2005. He teaches poetry at Pratt Institute and is an associate editor of the MLA International Bibliography.

Join us for an Evening of Authors from The Millions!

The Millions is an online magazine offering coverage on books, arts, and culture since 2003. The Millions has been featured on NPR and noted by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice, among others. The Millions was created and is edited by C. Max Magee.
http://www.themillions.com

Michael Bourne, a staff writer at The Millions since 2011, is a poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Orange Coast Review, River City, Oakland Review, and The Potomac Review, among other journals. His essays and journalism also appear regularly in Poets & Writers, where he is a a contributing editor, as well as in the Baltimore Sun, The Morning News, and The Los Angeles Book Review. He teaches at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son, Luke. As is required of all residents of Brooklyn, he has recently finished a novel. 

Sonya Chung is a staff writer for The Millions. She is the author of the novel Long for This World (Scribner 2010). Her stories, reviews, & essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sonora Review, FiveChapters, and Tin House Magazine, among others. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts Writers’ Fellowship & Residency, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. You can learn more about Sonya and her work at www.sonyachung.com.

Garth Risk Hallberg is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family His stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Slate, Canteen Best New American Voices 2008, and Best of the Web 2008. He lives in Brooklyn.

Emily St. John Mandel is a staff writer for The Millions. Her forthcoming novel, The Lola Quartet, is the #1 Indie Next pick for May 2012. Her two previous novels are Last Night In Montreal and The Singer’s Gun. Her short fiction will appear in the anthology Venice Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books this summer. She lives in Brooklyn and has a website at www.emilymandel.com.
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About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Rebecca Lindenberg’s first book of poems, LOVE: AN INDEX, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s Books in March 2012. Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in POETRY, The Believer, Iowa Review, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, No Tell Motel, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. She enjoys (among other things) a good rye Manhattan, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, new snow, and her growing menagerie of pets.

Neil Shepard has two new books: a full book of poems, (T)ravel/Un(t)ravel (Mid-List Press, 2011), and an offbeat chapbook, Vermont Exit Ramps (Pudding House Press, 2012). His three previous books of poetry are Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat (Mid-List Press, 1993), I’m Here Because I Lost My Way (Mid-List Press, 1998) and This Far from the Source (Mid-List Press, 2006), which was an “Editor’s Choice” at Notre Dame Review and a “Pick of the Month” from Small Press Reviews. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Boulevard, Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review and Ploughshares. He founded and directed the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center, and he taught for several decades in the BFA Creative Writing Program at Johnson State College in Vermont until his retirement in 2009. He presently lives in New York City and teaches poetry workshops at The Poets House. Outside of the literary realm, Neil is a founding member of the jazz-poetry group POJAZZ.

Elizabeth Powell’s first book of poems, The Republic of Self, won the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Post Road, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. Her essay “Infidelities” appeared in My Mother Married Your Father, an anthology of essays on step-families, published by WW Norton. She teaches at the University of Vermont, and is poetry editor of Green Mountains Review.

Michael Olson a Harvard graduate worked in investment banking and software engineering before earning a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, where he designed a locomotion interface for virtual environments. Strange Flesh is his first novel.

“If the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a titillating introduction to hacker noir, then Strange Flesh seduces us into a rocking threesome with it. Blending taut suspense with tech savvy and vigorous prose, Michael Olson shows us a world so salacious, the real on looks flaccid by comparison. This debut tour de force will leave mystery fans flushed, breathless, and begging for more. - Dustin Thomason
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“Tod Crouch has been published in bankrupted fashion magazines and Homosexual Gentlemen’s periodicals.  His work is also featured in the Anthology The Best Of Panic!  He regularly attends such readings as The Wilde Boys, Inspired Word, Reverend Jen’s Anti-Slam, The Gates Salon, Panic!, Nuclear Poetry, and Brother, My Lover.  He directed, produced and wrote his first play, “Undying Loyalty” at 17 and subsequently went on to write and direct four more plays in a Midwestern town no one has ever heard of.  He is also the author of the zines Here We Are, Sentences And Periods, Lois Dunaway, and Winter Was Hard while barely maintaining his blog,"Pod Of Tod.” His other novels include Romanticide, The Immaculates, The Night Watchman, The Accidental Protégé, and Gentlemen of the Shade.  Self-Untitled Publishing recently released his post-apocalyptic, coming-of-age road trip debut novel, “Cutting Teeth”, which he will be sharing with us tonight.  Please welcome, Tod Crouch.”

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Lila Cecil is the co-founder of Paragraph, a workspace for writers in Manhattan. She received her MFA from the New School. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Greetings, Anderbo.com, Salt Hill Journal and Prick of the Spindle. She was listed in the top stories category for Open City’s RRofihe Trophy for her story Don’t Drag Me Into This. She received a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation and a Vermont Studio Grant. She lives in Brooklyn.

Alexandra Enders worked as a magazine editor and writer before getting an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s been a Ucross Foundation resident and a finalist in the inaugural cycle of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. Her stories and articles have appeared in BOMB, Hunger Mountain, Critical Quarterly, Elle, Food & Wine, Poets & Writers, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. She is the author of the novel Bride Island (Plume) and is at work on a new novel.

Sara Farrington is a Brooklyn based playwright. Her play Mickey & Sage will premiere at The Incubator Arts Project, Sept 2012 (with mini-tours to NTI @ The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and The Great Plains Theater Conference, Omaha, NE.) Her newest play, Untitled Play About Brecht & His Girlfriends & Boyfriend & Wife, will have a workshop run July/August 2012 at Foxy Films, a performance space she shares with husband Reid Farrington. Other plays include The Vultures (The Weasel Festival, 13th St. Theater), That Stays There (Great Plains Theater Conference 2011 PlayLabs, Little Theater @ Dixon Place, The Bushwick Starr Reading Series), The Death of Evie Avery (FringeNYC), The Rise and Fall of Miles and Milo (FringeNYC, winner: Award for Outstanding Playwriting). Sara is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, the recipient of many Dragon’s Egg Artist Residencies and has been on several silent ‘pataphysics playwriting retreats with Erik Ehn. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College with Mac Wellman.

Ted Dodson is the founding editor and curator of On the Escape, a filmed journal, a curator for the Triptych Reading Series, and is an editor and the special projects coordinator for Futurepoem. Select publication can be found in TIM, Coldfront, Well Greased, la fovea, The Image Project, Onesies, and Interrobang. He is from Middleburg, VA and currently resides in Brooklyn.

Krystal Languell is the author of the poetry collection, Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011), which was also a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and DIAGRAM among other journals, and was anthologized in the 2010 edition of Best of the Web. Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as editor-in-chief for Noemi Press and a collaborative board member for Belladonna* Series.

Camilo Roldán is a poet and translator living in New York City and co-curates the monthly Triptych Reading Series at The 11th Street Bar in Manhattan. He is the author of a chapbook of translations, Amílkar U., Nadaísta in Translation (These Signals Press, 2011) and his poems have appeared in various journals, including Leveler, Lungfull! and Pank.

Amy King is the author of, most recently, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett, co-edits Esque Magazine and the PEN Poetry Series with Ana Bozicevic, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Sirius XM, WNYC, Manhattan Monologue Slam Champ) invites some of NY’s top writers and storytellers to share true, bizarre tales about their lives. There’s live accordion music, a challenging trivia game, and a free wine giveaway where one lucky audience member will walk away with their very own bottle of Sideshow Sauce! Tonight’s stellar lineup includes stories from:

Seth Lind (producer “This American Life”, host of “Told")
Erin Barker (Moth Grand Slam Champion, UCB East Theater)
Rory Scholl (The Moth, Chicago City Limits)

with music by Dr. Michelle-Leona Godin

Time Out New York “Critic’s Pick”
New York Daily News “Editor’s Pick”

Laura Cronk’s first book of poems, Having Been an Accomplice, won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and is forthcoming from Persea Books.  Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Barrow Street, Ecotone, WSQ, McSweeney’s, The Best American Poetry, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel.  She is currently on the faculty of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing for Democracy at The New School.

Marie Ponsot has published numerous poetry collections, including Easy (2009), Springing (2002), The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Green Dark (1988), Admit Impediment (1981), and True Minds (1957). Ponsot, who also translates books from the French, has taught in graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University and New York University. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University in New York City, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Sunday, April 22 at KGB Bar Sunday Night Literary Readings - 7pm

The Edgars are presented each year in NYC to the best mystery writers in books, short stories, plays, and TV teleplays.  The Edgars are considered ‘the Oscars’ of mystery writing, and an Edgar is a coveted and prestigious prize.  The week of April 22 – May 2 is traditionally hailed as Mystery Week in New York, this year commemorating the 66th anniversary of the Edgar® Awards in New York!  KGB launches the week with a reading by writers from the NYC Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

Mystery Night readers -

Bruce DeSilva is the author of “Rogue Island,” winner of the Edgar and Macavity awards for best first novel of 2010. DeSilva was a journalist for 40 years before retiring to write crime fiction. Stories he assigned and edited have won virtually every major journalism prize He has worked as a consultant on writing and editing for more than 50 newspapers and is currently is a master’s thesis adviser at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, the poet Patricia Smith, and two enormous dogs. Bruce is reading from “Cliff Walk,” his second Mulligan crime novel, which will be published on May 22

Sheila York - After a long career in TV and radio, Sheila began writing books combining her love of mystery, history and the movies. Set in Hollywood in the 1940s, her series features screenwriter/amateur sleuth Lauren Atwill using her insider knowledge of the entertainment business to chase killers in the Great Golden Age of Film.
Sheila York is reading passages from two of her Lauren Atwill mysteries—the most recently published A GOOD KNIFE’S WORK, which is set in New York City— and the book coming out in September of 2012, DEATH IN HER FACE.

Richie Narvaez was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He is an adjunct professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College. His fiction have been published in Mississippi Review, Murdaland, Indian Country Noir, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, and You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens. He has a story appearing in Long Island Noir, due out next month. His first book, Roachkiller and Other Stories, a collection of his short noir fiction, was published this March. He will be reading from his short story “Juracán” (pronounced WHO-rah-cahn) which is available on Amazon from my new ebook collection Roachkiller and Other Stories.

Kira Peikoff is a writer living in Manhattan. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from NYU and has written for the Daily News, Newsday, The Orange County Register, and New York magazine. Living Proof is her first novel. She will be reading a selection from her recently published debut novel LIVING PROOF.
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Sunday Night Fiction Director: Suzanne Dottino contact: Suzanne@kgbbar.com

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Guillermo Filice Castro’s work has appeared in journals such as Assaracus, Barrow Street, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, Ducts.org, Fogged Clarity, Hinchas de Poesia, LaFovea.org, La Petite Zine, Quarterly West, among others, as well as the anthologies Divining Divas, My Diva, This Full Green Hour, Saints of Hysteria, This New Breed, and more. His translations of Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, are featured in Guernica, Terra Incognita, U.S. Latino Review, and Visions. He’s the author of two chapbooks, Cry Me a Lorca (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010) and Toy Storm (Big Fat Press, 1997). Born and raised in Argentina, Castro is now a U.S. citizen.

Ron Drummond’s first collection of poems is the prize-winning Why I Kick at Night. His poetry also appears in the Penguin textbook Literature as Meaning, and in the anthologies Poetry Nation, Poetry After 9/11, This New Breed, and Saints of Hysteria. His translations, in collaboration with the talented and muy guapo Guillermo Filice Castro, have appeared in U.S. Latino Review, Terra Incognita and Guernica. He has been awarded fellowships from Ragdale, VCCA, and Blue Mountain Center, and is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Ron received honorable mention for the latest Pushcart Prize and has poems forthcoming in DUCTS and Ocean State Review.

Patricia Smith is the author of six acclaimed poetry volumes, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (April 2012); Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and the 2011 editions of both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. She is a professor at the City University of New York and serves on the faculties of the Stonecoast and Sierra Nevada College low-residency MFA programs.

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of numerous novels, most recently The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Her short fiction has been collected in eight volumes, including, The Ammonite Violin & Others, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and the forthcoming Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. She also writes for Dark Horse Comics. Kiernan was recently hailed by the New York Times as “One of our essential writers of dark fiction,” is a multiple nominee for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been honored by the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

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Scott Lynch, whose current projects are the forthcoming The Republic of Thieves, third novel in the Gentleman Bastard sequence, and the ongoing Queen of the Iron Sands, a serial pulp adventure set on a hidden Mars in the early 1950s.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written for Harper’s, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, n+1, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, The Nation, Slate, and other publications. A 2007-8 Fulbright fellowship brought him to Berlin, world capital of contemporary restlessness. He has more or less settled in Brooklyn.

Tom Bissell is a journalist, critic, and fiction writer, originally from Escanaba, Michigan. He writes for Harper’s Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, where he is a contributing editor. His short stories and journalism have also been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Science Writing. He is a frequent reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. 

Melissa Broder is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart (Publishing Genius, 2012) and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, 2010). Poems appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Redivider, Court Green, The Missouri Review online, Barrelhouse, The Awl, and Drunken Boat. She edits La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop in NYC. By day, she is a publicity manager at Penguin. Broder received her BA from Tufts University and is getting a slow, scenic MFA at CCNY. 

Martine Bellen is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Ghosts! (Spuyten Duyvil Press). Her collection Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), won the National Poetry Series. She collaborated with David Rosenboom on Ah! Opera No-Opera, which had its world premiere at REDCAT in L.A. She is currently collaborating with Zhang Er on the libretto Moon Lady: The Story of Chang E.

Nick Dybek is a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Short Fiction, A Maytag Fellowship, and a 2010 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. He lives in New York City. He reads from his novel: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man
”Robert Louis Stevenson would be proud of Nick Dybek...He delivers a page-turner full of danger, secrets, and betrayals.” Stewart O’Nan
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Claire Vaye Watkins reads from her book: Battleborn
Claire Vaye Watkins is a Nevadan and a Presidential Fellow at the Ohio State University.  Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, One Story, The Paris Review and elsewhere. She reads from her collection of short stories, Battleborn
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region’s vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure.
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Fiction Curator Suzanne Dottino contact: Suzanne@kgbbar.com

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Gray Basnight worked for almost three decades in New York as a radio newswriter, editor and reporter.  After being laid-off in 2009, he became deeply, and happily, immersed in fiction writing.  “The Cop with the Pink Pistol” is his first published novel.  Gray lives in New York City with his wife Lisa Weiss.  For more information, visit graybasnight.com.

Dorian Burden grew up in New York City, spending her first eight years in the tenements of the lower east side. Eventually her family would move on up, like the Jeffersons, to “a great big apartment in the sky.” She spent a decade working at magazines such as Working Woman, Psychology Today and Executive Female before becoming a teacher.  At some point, she believes was abducted by aliens and brought to the foreign planet of suburbia. She would eventually identify with her captors and, when given the chance to escape, would choose to stay in what has now become her home in Westchester County where she lives and teaches middle school. She is working on a memoir.

Originally from Minnesota, Sheetal Vedi now resides in New York City where she works as an Executive Assistant to the CEO of a consulting company. Like many, she came to New York to fulfill a dream or two:  one was meet her soul mate (she writes a blog called 101 Bad Desi Dates about this) and another was to become a serious writer of essays, articles and books – so she is keeping her day job so she can pay for her night writing courses!

Tom Perrota’s most recent novel, The Leftovers, was hailed by The Washington Post as “[Perrotta’s] most mature, absorbing novel, one that confirms his development from a funnyman to a daring chronicler of our most profound anxieties and human desires.” The Leftovers was named one of the Best Books of 2011 by The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, GQ, NPR’s Fresh Air, O the Oprah Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Amazon.com, and The Book Page.  Known for his trenchant satire of contemporary society, Tom is also the author of The Abstinence Teacher, Little Children, Joe College, Election, The Wishbones, and Bad Haircut.  Election and Little Children were made into movies of the same title, while a film of The Abstinence Teacher is in development. 

Mark Leyner returns to the novel form with an anarchic masterpiece, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, a tale of ancient gods and modern men that carries his trademark social satire and dense yet nimble prose.  As Sam Lipsyte writes, “The great Mark Leyner has returned.  He’s brought with him a visionary comedy, a nearly epic exegesis of a wonderfully ludicrous (and somehow completely believable) epic, and, most important, a pantheistic belief system we can all finally get behind.  Big ass brilliance on every sun-kissed page.” A postmodernist cult figure, Mark’s fiction includes My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Et Tu, Babe, and The Tetherballs of Bougainville.  His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller, Why Do Men Have Nipples? He also co-wrote the movie War, Inc. with John Cusack. 

Jürgen Fauth debuts with the novel, Kino, praised by Frederick Barthelme as “a fast, complex, exhilarating roadster ride through history and time.  It is the story of a woman who becomes obsessed with her grandfather, a visionary film director, [and] the powerful bindings of family, the sweet, dark loam of loss, and the high-voltage current of pulp fascism....an intoxicating Euro-brew, written with enormous skill and dedication.” A film critic for About.com, Jürgen is also a translator, editor, photographer, and co-founder of the literary community Fictionaut.  His writing on film has also appeared in Flavorpill, New York Newsday, and The Wiesbadener Kurier.  His short fiction has appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, La Petite Zine, Vestal Review, Chiron Review, and Blue Moon Review, among others.  Jürgen’s photography has been featured in New York: A Photographic Album, Time Magazine, and on a number of sites, including IFC, Publishers Weekly, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. 

Born in 1941, Eamon Grennan is a Dublin native and Irish citizen who has lived in the United States for over thirty years. He was educated at University College in Dublin and Harvard University.  His collections include: Matter of Fact (Graywolf Press, 2008); The Quick of It, (2005); Renvyle, Winter (special limited edition, 2003); Still Life with Waterfall (2002), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Selected & New Poems (2000); Relations: New & Selected Poems (1998); So It Goes (1995), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; As If It Matters (1992); What Light There Is and Other Poems (1989), a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What Light There Is (1987); and Wildly for Days (1983).  His Leopardi: Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1997) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and he has published a collection of critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Creighton University Press, 1999).  In his citation for the 2003 Lenore Marshall Award, poet Robert Wrigley wrote, “Grennan would have us know—no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste, and smell—that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards.” As well as a number of Pushcart Prizes, he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  He taught at Vassar College until his retirement. He lives in Poughkeepsie, and spends as much time as he can in the West of Ireland.

After an acting career, then a stint producing corporate videos and conferences, Gretl Claggett spent a decade as a saleswoman in the incentive (or “performance improvement”) industry. She’s what you might call a learning junkie, with MFAs in theater, poetry and nonfiction. She also possesses a passion for the healing arts, and is certified as a neurofeedback trainer and hypnotist. Drawing from this eclectic background—through writing, speaking and leading workshops — her mission is to help others create more authentic lives: personally and professionally.

Steve Griffiths was born on Anglesey, off the Welsh coast, and lives in London.  He will be reading from his sixth poetry collection, ‘Surfacing’, published by Cinnamon Press in late 2011.  Philip Gross, winner of the TS Eliot poetry prize in 2010, has written about Steve’s new book:

‘This is a varied but coherent collection by a subtle and deeply intelligent writer who can address human concerns like the intimate recall of childhood or the challenges of middle age without sentimentality........ His attention to detail and to nuance earns the poems a certain authority.......  It is an achievement to evoke the sensual qualities of a flock of starlings in flight while considering form and content in the widest sense; the complex of intellect and emotion in the phrase ‘mathematical / valedictory joy’ is a bold achievement’.

His previous book, ‘An Elusive State’ (Cinnamon, 2008), explores an imaginary civilisation.  Laura Thomas, a BBC producer who worked on performance from the book, described it thus: ‘It’s a parallel universe, a magical epic, a comfort, a mystery”. 

His Selected Poems were published by Seren in 1993.  This was followed by a 15-year-long break from publishing.  He works as a researcher and consultant in health and social policy, and is widely published in that field.  He is a campaigner against erosion of financial benefits for people with long-term health conditions in the UK. 

A note on ‘Surfacing’

‘Surfacing’ traces a movement from darkness into light.  It is not a simple movement.  It begins underground, in an abandoned place, where there are stirrings, occasional explosions into an inexplicably dazzling light, an insistence on miracles of optimism.  The tone shifts towards a recurrent note of affirmation in which darkness has its place, and is sometimes essential.  The poems look back, far back: ‘The Shelveian Event’ moves between the violence of shifting continents and the fossilised remains of individual raindrops; like many of these poems, it’s a celebration of the creation.  There is a repeated focus on childhood.  From all kinds of perspectives, Steve Griffiths is interested in how we came to be what we are.  He shines occasional sharp lights on the contemporary: being rejected for a job and knowing why; injustice in the Middle East; the decimation of wild birds; a woman singing hymns loudly in a London park. 

Guest Host Susan Tepper.

Donate a graphic novel or $5 to be entered in our raffle!
Book drive donations to benefit The Center for Cartoon Studies and The Sequential Artists Workshop

Hosted and curated by Robyn Chapman

Illustrator and writer Ellen Lindner is the author of Undertow, a graphic novel about Coney Island in the early sixties, and the editor of Strumpet, a transatlantic comic magazine showcasing up and coming women cartoonists.
http://www.littlewhitebird.com/

Leela Corman’s graphic novels include the 1999 Xeric Grant winner Queen’s Day, the teen angst tale Subway Series, and an epic graphic novel set in the tenements of the Lower East Side called Unterzakhn which will be released this April from Schocken Books. She is also a professional bellydancer and a teacher at The Sequential Artists Workshop.
http://leelacorman.com/

Since 1993 Jon Lewis has been the author of the ongoing comics series True Swamp, which has earned him a Xeric Grant, an Ignatz Award nomination, and a place on Time.com’s Ten Best Comics of 2000 and The Comics Journal’s Top 30 Minicomics of 2011 lists. His two most recent issues were released from Tom Kaczynski’s boutique publishing house, Uncivilized Books.
http://trueswamp.wordpress.com/

Sean Ford is an editor of the Sundays Anthology and the author of Only Skin. He is a graduate of The Center for Cartoon Studies, where he created Only Skin as part of his senior thesis. Since then he has self published seven issues, which will be collected in a graphic novel from Secret Acres in early 2012. He live in Fort Greene and works as book designer.
http://www.onlyskincomics.com

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Imagine a hybrid of John Berryman and Faulkner and the Rolling Thunder Revue, as curated by Samuel Beckett. Can you see it? Can you see it? Isn’t it a beautiful thing? Okay, well, forget it. This is nothing like that. Unsaid is hitting the road and hitting it hard in all the soft places. Here are the details:

Readings by:
Pamela Ryder
Brian Kubarycz
Robert Lopez
Katherine Manderfield

It’s Easter Weekend! Be there!

Since publishing his first story in English in 1995, Saravajo-born author Aleksandar Hemon has become one of the distinctive voices of his generation. Join us for an evening of his powerful nonfiction, from a forthcoming collection of personal essays.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles, which will be published by Riverhead Books on May 14, 2009. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. He lives in Chicago. 

Myra Shapiro born in the Bronx, returned to live in New York after forty- five years in Georgia and Tennessee where she married, raised two daughters and worked as a librarian and teacher of English. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Ohio Review, River Styx, Pearl, Ploughshares, The Poetry Miscellany, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals, and in many anthologies. She was awarded the New School’s Dylan Thomas Poetry Award and is the recipient of two fellowships from The MacDowell Colony. She serves on the Board of Directors of Poets House in New York City, a library and meeting place for poets. Her latest book is the memoir Four Sublets: Becoming a Poet in New York.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of three history books, including the bestseller best-seller Doubt: A History, and two volumes of poetry, The Next Ancient World and Funny. Her prose and poetry appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.  Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University in 1995 and now teaches in the MFA program of Columbia University and the Graduate Writing Program of The New School University.

Join us for an evening of readings and songs!
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Brothers, Heth and Jed Weinstein put together a two-man book event in which they perform songs and recount juicy stories from their busking adventures; including turf wars with roving busker gangs, run-ins with police, becoming unwitting First Amendment activists, and what it’s really like to serenade thousands of New Yorkers on a daily basis. Buskers: The On-the-Streets, In-the-Trains, Off-the-Grid Memoir of Two New York City Street Musicians
“From the minute I met these guys, I knew they had something special. Heth and Jed’s attitude towards getting music to the people without a label and major financing was way ahead of its time. It’s been exciting to watch from the sidelines as they take their career to new heights. Follow the story of how they became a well-oiled machine in the subways and streets of NYC, and then check out a gig for yourself.” —Jamie Candiloro (R.E.M., Willie Nelson, Courtney Love, Ed Kowalczyk, Ryan Adams) Website: www.hethandjed.com
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Jon Michaud is the head librarian at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to several New Yorker blogs. His debut novel, ”When Tito Loved Clara,” was published by Algonquin Books in 2011 and named one of the best novels of the year the Barnes & Noble review. Jon’s writing has appeared in Tin House, North American Review, Denver Quarterly and numerous other periodicals. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey with his wife and two sons.
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Sunday Fiction Curator: Suzanne Dottino: Contact: Suzanne@KGBBAR.COM

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Tamar Adler is the author of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace (Scribner, October 2011). She is a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, the founding head chef of Farm 255 in Athens, Georgia, and cooked at Chez Panisse from 2007-2009. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The New Leader, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Fine Cooking, Salon.com, Gift Taste, and Atlantic.com among other publications. Tamar lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Amy Axler has been writing for a very, very long time. She’s had a slew of different jobs, many of which have proved useful providing grist for the writer’s mill as well as unemployment benefits. She is currently working on a novel called “The Polish Newspaper.” It’s a love story. Amy graduated from college in California, and has an MFA from the New School. She blogs at dearpersonalgrocer.com.

Anna Raverat grew up in North Yorkshire and read English at King’s College, Cambridge University. In 2008 one of her short stories won a Bridport Prize. Her first novel Signs of Life will be published in April 2012 by Picador and Rowohlt and has been selected as one of the Waterstones 11--the UK’s biggest bookseller’s selection of the finest debut fiction for 2012. She works as a consultant and lives in London with her three young children.

Jon Prusik has lived in Brooklyn for nine years and works as a freelancer in the TV industry. Programs he’s worked on include: The Apprentice, The First 48, and Tim Gunn’s Guide To Style. He’s also written album reviews for an NYC music-based website, KevChino, affording him the chance to cover live events such as The National, Nine Inch Nails, and Nick Cave. And in the other fleeting pockets of time he finds inspiration trickling through. Work on a novel of urban fiction carries on.

Nikki Moustaki holds an M.A. in poetry from New York University and an M.F.A. in poetry from Indiana University. She is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry and is a recipient of a 2001 National Endowment for the Arts Grant in poetry. Nikki has taught creative writing at NYU, Indiana University, and The New School.

Ekoko Pauline Omadeke is a Cave Canem fellow and graduate of New York University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has been published in Arts Poetica and No, Dear Magazine. She is the founder and former curator of the Southern Writers Reading Series at Happy Ending Lounge. She spent a year teaching creative writing to 2nd graders through The Community Word Project’s Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program. She misses the rural two lane roads of Virginia, but not enough to leave Brooklyn where she lives and writes.

The Bitter Poet’s show “Looking For Love In All The Wrong Black Box Performance Spaces,” presented at 2011 FRIGID NY Fringe Festival, was nominated for Outstanding Performance Art Production by the NY Innovative Theatre Awards. The FronteraFest in Austin, TX selected The Bitter Poet for it’s “Best Of Festival Showcase” three years in a row.  The Bitter Poet was also selected for the Piccolo Spoleto Fringe Festival in Charleston, SC.  In New York City, The Bitter Poet has performed in venues including:  Dixon Place; PS122 Schoolhouse Rocks; The P.I.T.; La MaMa; Theatre For The New City; Bowery Poetry Club; Galapagos Art Space; Magnet Improv Theatre; Arlene Grocery; E.A.T.’s One Man Talking Festival; The Brick; Jalopy Theatre and many others. More at: www.thebitterpoet.com

Hosted by Lee Anderson

Please join us for a very special True Story with Dave Isay, the inspiring founder of Storycorps, one of the most ambitious oral history projects ever undertaken. Founded in 2003, StoryCorps has collected the life stories of more than 72,000 Americans in all 50 states, and preserved these interviews for future generations at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. There is no greater purpose for nonfiction, we think, than identifying the extraordinary in ordinary, daily life. Storycorps is that, distilled. Reading from his new book All There Is, Dave Isay will explore romantic love, collecting stories from around the country into three broad categories: Love found, love lost, and love found at last. The personal narratives cover the widest range of couples—lifelong partners and newlyweds, gay and straight, long-distance relationships forged by e-mails and letters, and love stories that reach across wars, illness, and even death. Come on out to witness true stories of real love, courtesy of Storycorps.

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Millions of radio listeners look forward to hearing these stories each Friday morning during NPR’s Morning Edition, and at storycorps.org. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including two StoryCorps books: Listening Is an Act of Love (2007) and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps (2010)—both New York Times bestsellers.

Eleni Sikelianos received an M.F.A. in Writing & Poetics from the Naropa Institute. She is the author of Body Clock (Coffee House Press, 2008), The Book of Jon (City Lights Publishers, 2004), The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004), Earliest Worlds (2001), The Book of Tendons (1997), and To Speak While Dreaming (1993). She is also the author of a number of chapbooks, including From Blue Guide (1999), The Lover’s Numbers, and Poetics of the X (1995). She has received the NEA Fellowship for Poetry, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing. She currently teaches at Naropa University and the University of Denver.

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, most recently Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009). Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (1992-1997). Her honors include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was “poet in residence” with Bob Dylan’s famed concert tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue, in 1975–76. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery. In 1974, with Allen Ginsberg, Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is active with OCCUPY ART, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, in New York City.

Brian Schwartz’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared or will appear soon in Harvard Review, Ascent, Washington Square, The Seattle Review and others. His story “Different Skin” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He also writes the sports column A Fan’s Notes at TheRumpus.net. Schwartz received an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, where he was awarded a Regents Fellowship and the Cheng Fellowship in Fiction. He is now a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. 

Genevieve Leone’s poetry has appeared in Del Sol Review, Faultline, Pool and Zocalo Public Square. Her poems are also now appearing throughout New York City as part of the Great Egg Hunt, which you can follow on Facebook.

Brando Skyhorse’s first book, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Things My Fathers Taught Me, will be published in May 2013. 

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Sirius XM, WNYC, Manhattan Monologue Slam Champ) invites some of NY’s top writers and storytellers to share true, bizarre tales about their lives. There’s live accordion music, a challenging trivia game, and a free wine giveaway where one lucky audience member will walk away with their very own bottle of Sideshow Sauce! Tonight’s stellar lineup includes stories from:

Juliet Wayne (The Moth Radio Hour)
Corey Pandolph (cartoonist for “The New Yorker")
Glennis McCarthy ("I Eat Pandas,” Risk! podcast)
Michelle Leona Godin ("The Star of Happiness")

Time Out New York “Critic’s Pick”
New York Daily News “Editor’s Pick”

Chris Belden’s novel “Carry-on” was published in January by Rain Mountain Press. A recent graduate of the Fairfield University MFA Program, CB has published stories in numerous small magazines; co-wrote the 1997 feature film Amnesia (starring Ally Sheedy); co-wrote the play The Ballad of Larry the Flyer (NY Fringe Fest, 2001); and has released two albums of original tunes, Songs About Anything and Camouflage. He currently teaches writing at Fairfield U., as well as at a high-security men’s prison in CT.

Sarah (Sally) McElwain is the editor of “Saying Grace: Blessings for the Family Table” and the author of “To the Happy Couple! Creating a Great Wedding Toast with Style” (both published by Chronicle Books). Her story, “Born Lucky,” won second place in American Fiction, Volume 10. She works as graphic designer for Maimonides Medical Center and teaches yoga at the Integral Yoga Institute and Jewish Guild for the Blind. A former teacher at The Writers Studio, she now co-hosts the WRITERS READ series at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge and The Cornelia Street Café.

J.E. Reich hails originally from Pittsburgh, PA--a drinking town with a football problem--and received her BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Her writing writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Armchair/Shotgun, Volume 1 Brooklyn, plain china: The Best of Undergraduate Writing 2010, KGB Bar & Lit Journal, Underground Voices, The Emerson Review, and others. Her writing was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010 and an EVVY Award in 2009, and she was the recipient of the Pitler Scholarship in 2011. Reich currently resides in Brooklyn, NY as a candidate for an MA in Literature at Brooklyn College, an intern for the Franklin Park Reading Series, and is currently working on her first novel.

Timothy Gager is the author of nine books of short fiction and poetry. His latest Treating a Sick Animal: Flash and Micro Fictions (Cervena Barva Press) features over forty stories, many previously published in various literary magazines. He has hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA every month for the past ten years.  His work has appeared in Night Train, Smokelong Weekly, McSweeneys, Hobart, Twelve Stories, JMWW, The Smoking Poet, Word Riot, Skive, Dogzplot, Metazen and many other venues.  He has had over 250 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007 and received nine Pushcart Prize nominations.  A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts and is employed as a social worker.

Series Host Susan Tepper

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

Terry Bisson, who has a new novel, Any Day Now, an alternate history of 1968, just out from Overlook Press.  Publishers Weekly describes it as “epic.” It’s not exactly science fiction, and not exactly not.  Terry is one of the founders of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series

&

Blake Charlton, who is author of the epic fantasies Spellwright and Spellbound from Tor Books. Charlton is also a medical student in his last year of medical clerkships and is currently working on Spellbreaker, the final novel in the Spellwright Trilogy..

Sponsored in part by Cemetery Dance Publications

Rob MacDonald lives in Boston and is the editor of the online journal Sixth Finch. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Octopus, Hanging Loose, H_NGM_N, No Tell Motel, New CollAge, and Free Verse. Last New Death, a chapbook, was recently published by Scantily Clad Press.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Striking Surface, winner of the Richard Snyder prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Best American Poetry, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House among other places. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004. He currently directs the Writing Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.