KGB Bar

Tom Perrotta is the author of six novels, including The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children.

Amy Bonnaffons is a second-year fiction student in NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.  She was born in New York and since then she’s spent time in Connecticut, Japan, Brazil, Thailand, and Burma.  She has taught writing and literature at the middle school, high school, and college levels.  In her spare time she likes to sing Balkan and Bluegrass music and wonder what Jesus did for fun.

Emily Brandt teaches English and yoga to high school students in Brooklyn, and co-edits No, Dear magazine.  Her poems have appeared in Swamp, Reconfigurations, and Podium, and her photos have appeared in The New York Times, The Rio Grande Review and The Jewish Week.

Georgie Devereux is a second year MFA student at NYU. She lives in Brooklyn.

Kimberly Faith Waid hails from Montgomery, Alabama. She received her B.F.A. from The Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia. She is a writer of both fiction and journalism—the latter having been published in ArtSlant, MetroMix, and The Los Angeles Times. When she is not at work on her first novel, she handles public relations for Washington Square, NYU’s nationally distributed literary journal. She is also a Fellow at Goldwater, a hospital on Roosevelt Island for patients with special disabilities. Here, she works with resident writers in transcribing their work and teaches weekly writing workshops. In her writing, she is inspired by sharks, civil rights, and old time radio.

About the Series: NYU Emerging Writers

The Emerging Writers Reading Series showcases the students of the NYU graduate Creative Writing Program, and features established writers as special guests.

Nothing Human is Alien to Us: What does a 9-11 Hero, George W. Bush, Aliens, and Spirituality and Yoga have to do with one another?  Everything.  Readings by a memoirist, a novelist, a sci-fi writer, and the editor of Lalitamba.

K.J. Fraser, a first time novelist, psychiatrist, and person of faith (and humor), reads from A Journey, a Reckoning and a Miracle, her creative response to despair over the Iraq War and the 2004 election. Sharon Watts, a visual artist, reads from the non-fiction Miss You, Pat: Collected Memories of NY’s Bravest of the Brave, Captain Patrick J. Brown. Carol Emshwiller, award winning science fiction writer, reads from one of her latest short stories, “The Lovely Ugly.” The readers will be introduced by Swamini Sri Lalitamba Devi, editor and publisher of “Lalitamba,” and author of the Mantra and the Goddess (TBR in 2010).

Readers:

Kathryn J. Fraser was born in Melbourne, Australia and as a toddler immigrated with her family to the United States, eventually settling in Tennessee. An honors graduate of Dartmouth Medical School, she is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque. Fraser is a long-term yoga practitioner and member of the First Unitarian Church. This, her first novel, was a Finalist in the New Mexico Book Awards. Website: www.jrmstory.com.

Sharon Wattsis an illustrator for various children’s books and fashion clients, a mixed-media artist, and the author of a book about a very spiritual and heroic man, the legendary firefighter Pat “Paddy” Brown. Captain Patrick J. Brown had an uncanny ability to be exactly where he was needed at exactly the right time. He died on September 11, 2001, surrounded by scores of burn victims he was trying to evacuate from the WTC’s North Tower. Outside the FDNY, the many people whose lives he touched insist that he was inspired when it came to knowing their hurt, and how to heal it. To deal with her loss, his close friend and former fiancée, Sharon Watts, began collecting stories about Pat, carefully stitching them together with her own personal narrative. The result is an intimate and moving literary experience, as well as a riveting introduction to a highly complex man whose legacy—encapsulated in Miss You, Pat-- is destined to live on. Learn more at: www.missyoupat.org.  Sharon is also a yoga practitioner and has held several book events with yoga studios Pat had trained with, and book profit proceeds benefit “Bent On Learning”, which teaches yoga and meditation to NYC public school children who need to reduce stress in their lives.

Carol Emshwiller is the author of 6 novels, one of which won the Philip K. Dick Award ... The Mount.  She will be reading from her short story “The Ugly Lovely.” Emshwiller grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and France. She lives in New York City in the winter and the Sierras in the summer. Emshwiller has written a sci-fi novel, The Secret City, Tachyon Publications (2007), a short story collection, I Live With You, Tachyon Publications, and Report to the Men’s Club, a book of short stories available from Small Beer Press.  Emshwiller has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, two New York State Foundation for the Arts grants, and two World Fantasy awards. Carol Emshwiller’s short stories have appeared in many literary magazines and science fiction magazines including TriQuarterly, Transatlantic Review, New Directions, Orbit, Epoch, F&SF, Century, and Crank. Contact:htt://www.sfwa.org/members/emshwiller/index.html

Moderator:

A mystic, a yogini, and a beloved spiritual teacher, Swamini Sri Lalitambika Devi serves through Lalitamba Mandiram, a temple in New York City. Her humanitarian projects have touched the hearts of thousands.  Swamini Sri inspires seekers in spiritual centers of various faiths, as well as in hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons, universities, and at the United Nations. She is the Director of the Meditation Program for the Addiction Institute of New York’s Detoxification Unit, and a consultant to Mount Sinai Hospital’s Department of Psychiatric Rehabilitation. She is also a representative to the United Nations for the United Religions Initiative and Chair of Women Rising, a working group of the UN-CSVGC. She is the author of Mantra and the Goddess, forthcoming in July 2010. Swamini is also the editor of a literary journal called Lalitamba (P. O. Box 131, Planetarium Station, New York, NY, 10024). Visit:  www.lalitamba.org. Available through: Baker & Taylor, Eileen Rieger at (908) 541-7466, or New Leaf Distribution, (800) 326-2665. The latest volume is Number 3.

Proceeds support charity projects for global harmony. Copies of the journal are also donated to hospitals, shelters, and prisons. Please contact Lalitamba Mandiram, if your organization would like to receive copies. PH: (212) 873-0140, lalitamba1000@yahoo.com.

*Books will be provided for sale by Mobile Libris,
917-539-4679, mobilelibris@earthlink.net

Star Black is the author of three books of sonnets, Waterworn, Balefire and Ghostwood, a series of double-sestinas Double Time, and book of collaged texts October for Idas. She has taught at The New School and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Stony Brook University. Her hand-made books of collages were shown at The Center for Book Arts, and her photographs were recently featured in “Site Specific”, an exhibit at Turtle Point Press gallery. She co-founded the KGB Bar Poetry Series in l997.

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.

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.

Veterans Speak Out on: Pharmacology, Self-hood, and Negligent Discharge is the latest installment of “Veterans Speak Out,” an ongoing reading series where a rotating group of veterans from the wars over there come home on special assignment to marshal the forces of fiction and poetry against-absent minded nihilism, despair, thin wires, false advertising, tall tale truth, revenge-beauty, and that deep (shallow) malaise of yours.

Gavin Kovite was an Infantry platoon leader with the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad from 2004-2005. He currently studies law at NYU and has recently completed his first novel, Slaughter at Suez, with co-author Christopher Robinson.

Perry O’Brien served as a medic with the 82nd Airborne Division and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2003. He is currently a labor organizer and the NYC chapter president of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Jacob Siegel is an Army veteran who served in Iraq. He is a Brooklyn Native and still resides in the borough.  Mr. Siegel’s work has been published in New York Press, New Partisan and The Arch.  Currently, Mr. Siegel is writing a book, which he describes as a pulp detective novel set inside an epic detective novel. He would rather not say anything more about it but if agents or wealthy patrons are interested the working title is “Lucifer’s Nightgown.”

Maurice Decaul is a Marine Veteran who served in Iraq. He emigrated from the Caribbean Island of St. Vincent as a child and grew up in Brooklyn where he now lives with his Wife and children. Mr. Decaul is a student at Columbia University and a poet. His work has been published in The New York Times and Nine Lines, an anthology of veteran’s writing.

Roy Scranton is an Army veteran who served in Iraq. He is originally from Oregon but now resides in Brooklyn. He is a graduate student at The New School for Social Research earning his MA in Liberal Studies. Mr. Scranton’s work has been published in Denver Quarterly, LIT, canon, Glyphs and Nine Lines, an anthology of veteran’s writing.

Phil Klay is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq. He grew up in White Plains, New York and now lives in Manhattan. Mr. Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and is currently completing an MFA at Hunter College.

Nat’l Poetry Month
Guillermo Castro
Ron Drummond
TBA

About Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte was raised in Alpine, a small town in West Texas. She attended St. Edward’s University where she majored in English Literature, graduating at the top of her class. While working for UT Austin dealing with financial aid, she founded a blog called Mouse Words, which consisted mostly of musings on music and feminism. Amanda won the Koufax award for Best New Blog of 2004 for Mouse Words, and shortly after she went to work on another popular blog, Pandagon. She has also written for AlterNet and the Washington Post’s PostGlobal forum.

Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international smash hit Runaways, Elizabeth Swados has composed, written and directed for over thirty years. Her theatrical works have been performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, at La MaMa, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, and locations all over the world. Her literary career includes novels, non-fiction books, children’s books and now her first collection of poetry, The One and Only Human Galaxy, about the life of Houdini and escapism, has been published by Hanging Loose Press. Awards include the KEN Book Award, five Tony nominations, three Obie Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Grant, Helen Hayes Award, PEN Citation and others.

Robert Hershon has written 12 books of poetry, most recently Calls from the Outside World, and has won two NEA fellowships and three from New York State. He is co-editor of Hanging Loose Press and executive director of The Print Center.

Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drives (named on of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and the novels The Subject Steve and Homeland. He read from his novel The Ask

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John Wray is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan’s Tongue. He was named Granta magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. He reads from his novel, Lowboy

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.

Keith Waldrop’s 2009 books are: Transcendental Studies (poetry, Univ. of California Press, National Book Award 09); Several Gravities (collages, Siglio Press); and a translation of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: little poems in prose (Wesleyan Univ. Press). He has also translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil as well as books by contemporary French poets Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Dominique Fourcade, Pascal Quignard, and Jean Grosjean. Other books of poems include The Real Subject (Omnidawn) and the trilogy: The Locality Principle, The Silhouette of the Bridge (America Award, 1997) and Semiramis, If I Remember (Avec Books). He was born in Emporia, Kansas in 1932 and now lives in Providence, RI where he teaches at Brown University and, with Rosmarie Waldrop, edits the small press Burning Deck. 

Announcing Easter Sunday KGB Reading Line-Up

The KGB Annual Easter Comix Reading will feature:

Emily Wernet: http://aladyisme.livejournal.com/
Tom Hart: http://www.tomhart.net/
Joan Reilly: http://www.joanreilly.com/
Mark Alan Stamaty: http://www.markalanstamaty.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.

Ada Limón’s first book, Lucky Wreck, was the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize. Her third book of poems, Sharks in the Rivers, will be published by Milkweed Editions in September, 2010.

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of Halflife, a collection of poems. A recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Award for Poetry, she is co-poetry editor of The Paris Review and a culture critic for Slate. She is at work on a nonfiction book about grief.

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.

ANDREA SCRIMA was born in New York City and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, where she lives and works. A LESSER DAY is her first book. Scrima has received numerous awards for her artistic work, as well as a writer’s grant from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts and a National Hackney Literary Award. She is currently working on an anti-war children’s graphic novel titled ISHMAEL.

Lynda Schor is a prizewinning author of four published collections of short fiction, most recently, THE BODY PARTS SHOP, published by Fiction Collective 2 (FC2).  She’s the author of a multitude of anthologized stories, magazine articles, and reviews.  Her latest and fifth collection, SEDUCTION, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in February.  She taught fiction writing at a number of universities, and at The New School for 25 years.  She now lives in San Miguel de Allende, MX.

Paragraph’s monthly series at KGB showcases our members’ work. Join us in February for readings by Brian Sack and Douglas Danoff. Free and open to the public.

Brian Sack is the author of In The Event of My Untimely Demise and a contributing author of the New York Times bestselling book Arguing With Idiots. He’s written humor for a variety of publications and has never been to Belarus. He’s engaged in a Google-rank battle with another Brian Sack who works for the Federal reserve. See his website here. http://briansack.com/

Douglas Danoff’s short stories, essays, and humor pieces have been published by The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review, Agni, Wine Spectator, Tampa Review, The Jerusalem Post, La Stampa, and many others. Winner of the 2007 Danahy Fiction Prize, he has received a grant from the Jerome Foundation and fellowships for residencies from the Anderson Center, Hall Farm Center, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.

Steve Almond is the author of five books.  His new book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life will be out next month.  He has also, crazily, self-published a book called This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey composed of 30 very brief stories, and 30 very brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing.

Nelly Reifler is the author of See Through a collection of stories.  Her work has been published by McSweeney’s, BOMB, Post Road, Jubilat and others, and has been translated into several languages. 

Keith Lee Morris’ story collection Call It What You Want is his second book from Tin House, the first was the novel the Dart League King (2008).  Stories from the collection appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, Ninth Letter, New England Review and elsewhere.  He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Clemson University.

Host: Susan Tepper

Release event for Shya Scanlon’s debut poetry collection, In This Alone Impulse, published by Noemi Press. Reading from the manuscript will be a variety of writers and artists, including:

Lincoln Michel, James Yeh, John Madera, John Dermot Woods, Rozalia Jovanovic, Nicolle Elizabeth, Todd Zuniga, James J. Williams III, Terese Svoboda, Emma Straub, Sasha Graybosch, Nick Bredie, Nora Jean Lange, Joe Sullivan, Peter Schwartz, Timmy Waldron, Brianna Danielle, and more TBD.

Brian Evenson has this to say about the collection: “With each reading these pieces change, seeming less and less enigmatic and more insistently full of lyrical human meaning. A marvelous and original sequence; there’s really nothing else out there like it.”

Learn more by visiting www.shyascanlon.com, or www.noemipress.org/scanlon

Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009).  Her poems have appeared in FENCE, the Iowa Review, Contrary Magazine, and elsewhere. Recently, Petrosino was profiled in Poets & Writers Magazine as part of the Annual Debut Poets Roundup.  She lives and works in Iowa City.

Brett Eugene Ralph

Melville House is pleased to announce the addition of Lore Segal’s LUCINELLA to their acclaimed Contemporary Art of the Novella Series
Lore Segal was born in Vienna, Austria in 1928. She emigrated to New York in 1951 and soon began selling to The New Yorker and other magazines. She is the author of Other People’s Houses. After Lucinella, which went on to receive numerous writing prizes, including an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her 1985 novel Her First American. Her most reent book, the story collection Shakespeare’s Kitchen, was a finalist for the 2008 Pulizter Prize. She reads from her novella, Lucinenlla.

“Lucinella is a shamelessly wonderful novel, so flawless one feels civilized reading it.” Stanley Elkin

TAO LIN was born in Alexandria, Virginia in 1983, the son of Taiwanese immigrants.  His father was a pioneer in the field of laser eye surgery, and soon moved the family to Orlando, Florida, where Lin spent his childhood.  He moved to New York City in 2001 to attend New York University, where he earned a B.A. in journalism and an undergraduate creative writing prize.  He became well known while still an undergraduate for his literary website, Reader of Depressing Books, which took a close and often controversial look at mainstream literary culture.  In 2006, he published a poetry collection, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am, followed in 2007 by the simultaneous Melville House publications of his story collection Bed and the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee.  His work expressed strong sentiments against mainstream culture and in favor of alternative lifestyles such as veganism.  The books became underground sensations and Lin became known for staging outrageous conceptual art events in support of them, such as giving a reading where he repeated the same sentence over and over again; blanketing New York City with stickers saying simply “Britney Spears”; and a successful online campaign selling “shares” in a future work for $2,000 apiece.  In 2008, Lin published his next poetry collection with Melville House, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.  It has been assigned as a text in several college-level psychology courses.  Lin’s next novel, Richard Yates, will be published in the fall of this year.

ZACHARY GERMAN was born in southern New Jersey in 1988. In 2006 he dropped out of high school and moved to Philadelphia, PA. He delivered pizza and other things on his bicycle, and later worked at a thrift store. In 2007 his story “letting me out first part” was selected by Dennis Cooper for inclusion in the Userlands anthology from Akashic Press, and an early excerpt from Eat When You Feel Sad was published as an e-book by Bear Parade. In 2008 he moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he completed Eat When You Feel Sad. He currently works as a dog walker in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

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.

Ephen Glenn (fiction) was born in Ohio. In 2002-03 he was a Writing Fellow at the The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. His fiction has appeared in Shankpainter. His nonfiction—Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1996), in which he was a co-editor and contributing writer—won the 1997 Meyer Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Ephen holds a M.A. in American Studies from New York University and a B.A. from Bard College, where he studied Literature and Gender to write his senior thesis, “‘The Choice Word or the Chosen Silence’: Male Homoeroticism in Harlem Renaissance Literature, 1925 - 1932”. These days he hustles in New York City as a certified Hatha Yoga teacher, freelance editor, and creative writer

Jenna Risano (poetry) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hamilton, New Jersey. After a five year stint in Tampa she is ready to add a new turnpike exit to her repertoire. She received a BA in English-Writing from the University of Tampa in 2008. At UT she was Poetry Editor of the literary magazine, won the Tim O’Connor Award for Writing, and was awarded Best English Graduate and Best Writing Portfolio. When she’s not writing or reading, or writing about reading, her loves include hockey, listening to her records, and watching old movies.

Kevin Catalano (fiction) was born and raised in Chittenango, NY, home of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, meaning he grew up surrounded by Oz-themed cafes and stores, yellow-bricked sidewalks, and perfectly normal residents who, every year, dressed as Oz characters for the town’s annual Oz Festival.  He is convinced that this environment has messed with his head in strange, irreversible ways.  He received his B.A. in English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, studied reindeer husbandry in Finland, and now lives in New Jersey with his wife, where he teaches composition full-time at Rutgers-Newark. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle, Cause & Effect Magazine, PANK, Denver Syntax, the Absent Willow Review Anthology, and other places nobody’s ever heard of.  A short story of his was also nominated for StorySouth’s 2008 Million Writers Award.

What do first-century Palestinians have in common with Depression-era tenant farmers? Find out on March 19th at KGB Bar in New York City, as the writer James Agee (1909-1955) is expected to return from the dead to celebrate the release of Scott Korb’s Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine. The event, sponsored by Killing the Buddha, will feature readings by Korb—in the flesh—and Agee—as summoned by KtB’s resident medium Ashley Makar. Before and after, join the authors for drinks and conversation.

Publishers Weekly says of Life in Year One, “Korb’s vivid, breezy prose makes accessible a mountain of scholarship that illuminates the past.” Jeff Sharlet, the New York Times bestselling author of The Family and founding editor of KtB, has called it “Expertly researched, beautifully distilled, and filled with wit.”

Scott Korb is co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us and associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, winner of the American Historical Association’s 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize. He currently teaches religion and food writing at the New School and New York University. Read his tumblr at lifeinyearone.tumblr.com.

Killing the Buddha associate editor Ashley Makar is a writer from Alabama who is working toward a Masters of Divinity in religion and the arts at Yale Divinity School. She has conjured Agee before—from her KtB essay on what his punctuation might have to do with heaven, to her collaborative project on the musical afterlife of his prose-poem “Knoxville: Summer, 1915.” While writing about Sudanese refugees in Israel, Ashley likes to keep on hand a copy of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the account of his journey with Walker Evans among Southern farmers.

Killing the Buddha (www.killingthebuddha.com) is an online religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. Since 2000, it has published uncommon commentary, journalism, reviews, fiction, art, and more about religion, politics, and culture. The site has spawned two books: Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press, 2004) and Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon, 2009), which Library Journal calls “shocking, exhilarating, and never dull—highly recommended.”

...and your hostess, Kathleen Warnock

Jessie Male is a writer, dancer and native New Yorker. Since graduating
from Oberlin College in 2005 she has worked as: an editor for the
number two grocery trade magazine in the country, a grant writer,
assistant to the colloid and surfactant king of America/ co-organizer
of the 2009 ICSCS ACS IACIS Colloid & Surface Science Symposium, a
writing teacher, and a research assistant. Her dating life has been as
eclectic as her employment history, so she recently co-founded the Web
site Baddategreatstory.com, where some of her stories can be read, and
which is currently seeking submissions. Jessie is an MFA student in
nonfiction at Hunter College. She is currently working on her first
memoir.

Carol Rosenfeld is a writer and poet residing in New York City until
she can move to the country and become the old woman all the village
children are afraid of. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, she
published some stories in various lesbian erotica anthologies. She also
has three novels in various stages of development, classifying them
like a kind of literary Goldilocks: “This novel’s just started; this
novel’s a quarter of the way there; this novel is just about right. I
think I’ll nap now.”

Meri Weiss was born and raised in New York. She holds a BA in English
from the University of Michigan, an MFA in Creative Writing from
Southampton College and a Master of Arts in Literature from SUNY New
Paltz. She was the recipient of the Sarah Tucker Award for Fiction and
Southampton College’s John Steinbeck Award. CLOSER TO FINE, her debut
novel, was nominated for a 2009 Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted
for the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers. Meri
teaches literature at The College of New Rochelle’s South Bronx campus.
She is slowly but surely writing her second novel, tentatively titled
ON BORROWED TIME.

Drunken! Careening! Writers! is a monthly reading series dedicated to
the proposition that readings should be: excellent, well-read pieces
that have at least one thing in them that makes people laugh (nervous
laughter counts), and don’t run more than 15 minutes each.  For
information: careeningwriters@aol.com

Michael Shea is the multi-award-winning author of such books as A Quest For Simbilis, Nifft The Lean, and Polyphemus. His most recent publications are The Extra from Tor, Copping Squid from Perilous Press, and The Autopsy And Other Tales from Centipede Press.

&

N. K. Jemisin, whose first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — first of the Inheritance Trilogy — is out now from Orbit Books. A local writer with the “Altered Fluid” writing group, her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Postscripts (forthcoming), and Strange Horizons among other print, online, and audio markets. Her short story, “Non-Zero Probability,” was recently nominated for a Nebula Award.

A night with:

Barbara Hammer, HAMMER! (Fem Press)
Hilton Als, THE WOMEN (FSG) and THE GROUP (FSG)

BARBARA HAMMER has made over eighty films and video works over the past forty years. Her experimental films of the 1970s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm, and lesbian sexuality. In the 1980s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history. Her most recent work, A Horse is Not a Metaphor, won the 2009 Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. A retrospective screening of her work will be presented at the Museum of Modern Art in spring 2010 and will travel to the Reina Sophia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London.

HILTON ALS is the theater critic for “The New Yorker” magazine and frequent contributor to “The New Yorker” magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section.

Hilton is a former staff writer for “The Village Voice” and former editor-at-large at “Vibe” magazine, and his work has appeared in “The Nation.” Hilton was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000 for creative writing and is the winner of the 2002-03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He has also written film scripts, “Swoon” and “Looking for Langston” and his first book, “The Women,” was a meditation on gender and race and their roles in the forging of personal identity.

Lee Upton is the author of eleven books, including the novella The Guide to the Flying Island (Miami University Press).  She has written five books of poetry, most recently Undid in the Land of Undone, and four books of literary criticism.  Her poetry and short stories appear widely. She is the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.

Electric Literature presents Electric Nights at KGB, celebrating the release of their third anthology.

Featuring the following readers:

Rick Moody is the author of four novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir, The Black Veil. His new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, will be published in July 2010. He also plays music in The Wingdale Community Singers, whose new album, Spirit Duplicator, is out now.

Wythe Marschall lives in Brooklyn, New York.  He is a graduate of Bennington College and the MFA fiction-writing program at Brooklyn College, where he now teaches literature.  Wythe’s stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, 5_Trope, Knock, The Kennesaw Review, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.  He is a senior editor of Atlas Obscura (atlasobscura.com).  For more riveting biographical data, visit Wythe’s website, chronolect.com.

Jenny Offill is the author of the novel Last Things, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Story, Epoch, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, and The San Francisco Review of Books, among other places.

Cristina Moracho is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program. She is working on her first novel.