KGB Bar

Sara Grossman (poetry) was raised on a flower farm in Chesterfield, New Jersey.  She received her B.A. in English and Music from Rutgers College in New Brunswick, NJ.  After studying at Rutgers, she worked in the financial sector and later returned to farming.  Her poetry explores the practice of everyday life as a series of complex processes bound to social, cultural, and historical experience.

Dickson Lam (fiction) was born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco.  He received his BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and his MA in Education at Teachers College of Columbia University.  He has worked in various capacities to reform education including serving as an AmeriCorps member at Coleman Advocates to address educational equity, teaching high school English and Social Studies for seven years, including being a founding teacher at June Jordan School for Equity, a small high school in San Francisco.  Most recently, he has worked at the Public Service Center at UC Berkeley coordinating AmeriCorps programs focused on serving underserved youth.

Nick Ripatrazone (fiction) lives in rural New Jersey with his wife.  He is no stranger to Newark: his mother is from the Ironbound, he played soccer at dusty Independence Park, and he earned an MA in English Literature at Rutgers Newark, where he was awarded Highest Distinction in Literary Studies.  He was third prizewinner in the 2008 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest.  His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Sou’wester, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Quarterly.  He is a public-school English teacher and is also completing graduate work in Catholic theology.