KGB Bar

Join us for Zine Therapy, literary explorations of shame, rage, and joy by four crazy zine ladies from Washington Heights, the East Village, Park Slope, and the Lower East Side.

Veronica Liu, coordinator of Fractious Press and Washington Heights Free Radio; Andria Alefhi, curator of We’ll Never Have Paris and the radio show, Zine Therapy; Betsy Housten, author of You Know Better and the woman behind the Bluestockings zine collection; and Jenna Freedman, author of Lower East Side Librarian and zine librarian at Barnard College.

Darin Strauss is the best-selling author of The New York Times Notable novels The Real McCoy and More Than It Hurts You and The Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Chang & Eng.  His latest book, Half a Life, coming September 15th, has been excerpted in GQ and on This American Life.  Strauss has seen his work translated into 14 languages, and published in 20 countries; he’s received numerous awards, most recently a Guggenheim in Fiction Writing.  Also a screenwriter – he’s worked with Disney films, Julie Taymor, and, on the adaptation of Chang & Eng, with Gary Oldman – Darin has additionally written fiction, essays, and criticism for the Times, GQ, Esquire, One Story, McSweeney’s, The Washington Post, Salon, and many others. 

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels Bad Marie and Twins.  Hailed by The Nervous Breakdown as “genuinely sexy, dark and subversive but also freaking weirdly hilarious,” Bad Marie is a Barnes and Noble Fall 2010 Discover Great New Writers pick.  Time Magazine pronounced Bad Marie “irresistible.” Marcy’s short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Five Chapters.  She lives in Astoria with her husband, writer Jurgen Fauth, and her daughter Nina.

Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both, Please Step Back, and most recently, What He’s Poised to Do.  His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, and Opium, and he has been widely anthologized.  He is also a regular contributor to the online music site www.moistworks.com.  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

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Behind the Book is a literacy nonprofit working with low-income students in NYC public schools.  Our mission is to excite children and young adults about reading.  Working in the 1st -12th grades, we bring authors and their books into individual classrooms to build literacy skills and a new generation of book readers.  www.behindthebook.org

“Poetry taken to the edge and back round again.”
Uphook Press celebrates the publication of its latest anthology hell strung and crooked. Based in New York City, Uphook Press specializes in work by poets and spoken word artists who love both the ink and the mike.

VICKI IORIO performs throughout Long Island and New York City and is a proud member of the Farmingdale Writers Group.

R. NEMO HILL is the author of Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002), The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004), and Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006).  He is editor of EXOT BOOKS.

DAVID LAWTON is a performer, poet, and writer originally from Woburn, MA. During his 25 years in New York City, David has acted, written plays, and sung backing vocals for the underground band, Leisure Class.

E. K. MORTENSON was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and is the author of Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010). He lives in Stamford, CT.

PUMA PERL facilitates workshops in community-based agencies and at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She is the author of Belinda and Her Friends (Erbacce Press, 2009) and knuckle tattoos, (Erbace Press, 2010).

JOHN MARCUS POWELL has strutted the boards in London’s West End, Off and Off-Off Broadway, and appeared on television and film. Recently he’s been concentrating on writing poetry—a lot of it about being queer in a queer world.

JACKIE SHEELER’s third book, earthquake came to harlem, is published by NY Quarterly this fall.  She is a poet, songwriter, and activist who enjoys performing random acts of kindness almost as much as random acts of righteous indignation.

ELLIOTT D. SMITH spent the first 18 years of his life in the same house in Louisville, KY, but has since resided in ten places in Oxford, Cincinnati, and Yellow Springs, OH, as well as four in Brooklyn, NY. With a degree in psychology, Elliott conducts research on masculinity, friendships, and identity formation.

OCEAN VUONG was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in New York City, where he is an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College. His poems appear in Word Riot, Connecticut River Review, Asian American Poetry, and SOFTBLOW, among others.

BRUCE WEBER is the author of five books of poetry, including The Break-up of My First Marriage (Rogue Scholars Press, 2009) and has been widely published in magazines and anthologies including Up is Up, But So Is Down: Downtown Writings, 1978-1992 (NYU Press, 2006).

Chandler Klang Smith is a graduate of Bennington College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she received a School of the Arts Writing Fellowship.  She has worked as a reader for the Columbia Journal and the Paris Review. She has also ghost-written two YA novels for Alloy Entertainment Group and taught creative writing in Columbia’s Double Discovery and INTRO programs. An excerpt from her unpublished novel Goldenland Past Dark won the Bronx Writers Center Chapter One award in 2006; the complete manuscript was nominated for a Pushcart Editor’s Book Award in 2009 and received an Honorable Mention in the Leapfrog Fiction contest in 2010.  She currently lives in New York City, where she works as an editorial assistant at a literary agency and as the Events Coordinator for the KGB Bar.

Valerie Wetlaufer is a poet and birth doula in Salt Lake City. Born and raised in Iowa, she has since lived in Vermont, Paris, Florida and Utah. She holds an MA in Teaching from Bennington College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Currently she is a doctoral fellow in Literature at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Drunken Boat, Bloom, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Main Street Rag, and PANK Magazine. She was a 2010 Fellow at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writers’ Retreat and her chapbook Scent of Shatter was published earlier this year by Grey Book Press.

Nominated by Columbia MFA faculty, our readers will charm, engage, and mystify all those in attendance with a sampling their best work. In addition, at the end of the night we will feature a reading by Columbia MFA alum Aaron Hamburger, the author of THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD and FAITH FOR BEGINNERS.

Our line-up this month:

Quressa Robinson grew up in San Francisco where she worked for a year as the Volunteer Coordinator at the original 826 Valencia. She is in the process of completing a novel tentatively titled, “Playing with Paper Dolls.” Her fuel is chocolate, wine, and many pairs of cute shoes--contributions of which would be greatly appreciated.

Claire E. Bernard is a writer and philanthropist living in New York City. Claire has a column entitled Philanthropy 2.0 on vanityfair.com, and is currently editing her first novel. She is Vice President of the Mariposa Foundation, holds BAs in Art History, Art-Semiotics, and Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and is a vegan and exercise buff.

Jamila-Khanom Allidina holds an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Toronto, and has never worn a fat suit.

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What is Faculty Selects?  The first Thursday of each month from September through April, the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series with writers selected by the faculty. These fresh talents have finished their coursework and are finished with or near to finished with their first books, but do not yet have a book contract and/or an agent. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success; this is your chance to glimpse who you’ll be reading in 2012!

Faculty Selects is curated by Bryan VanDyke and Emily Austin.

Sweta Srivastava Vikram a graduate of Columbia University, is a multi-genre writer and marketing professional living in New York City. She is the author of two upcoming chapbooks of poetry: Kaleidoscope: An Asian Journey of Colors and Because all is not lost: Verse on Grief and co-author of a forthcoming poetry collection titled Whispering Woes of Ganges & Zambezi. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications across the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, New Zealand, and Philippines. Sweta has held recent artist residencies in Portugal, Ireland, and the U.S., and worked on collaborative projects with artists from Zimbabwe and Australia.

Chris Tarry is a Canadian musician and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The G.W. Review, PANK, Cell Stories, Paradigm Journal, Opium Magazine, Northville Review, Drunken Boat, Defenestration, Metazen, and others. He makes his living playing bass in New York City, where he’s also hard at work on his first novel, The Wedding King of Vermont. He’s a three-time Juno Award winner (Canada’s top music prize), and has been nominated for the award nine times. 

Award-winning storyteller Leslie Goshko (Manhattan Monologue Slam Champion, NY Fringe Excellence Award, WNYC), 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:

Andy Christie (NY Times, NPR, Moth GrandSlam Champion)
Dan Allen (Comedy Central, Sacapuntas)
Kambri Crews (The Moth, Lovedaddy.org)
Carter Edwards (Upright Citizens Brigade, The Liar Show)

hosted by: Leslie Goshko

SUSAN SHAPIRO is the author of Speed Shrinking (out in paperback July 21, 2010), her hilarious fictional debut that became an international phenomenon. She has been featured on The Today Show, The Early Show, CNN, LX-TV, Oxygen, E Entertainment, The New York Times, Elle, Glamour, Oprah.com, Salon.com and People.  Her other books include Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Lighting Up, and Only as Good as Your Word.  She lives with her husband, a TV/film writer, in Greenwich Village where she teaches her popular “instant gratification takes too long” writing classes at the New School and NYU. 

KATE ROCKLAND is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Style section and has also written for Playboy, Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Time Out New York, Spin and the Newark Star-Ledger.  She worked for two years at Rolling Stone, where she followed around freakishly beautiful celebrities with a microphone and was also an assistant editor at Wenner Books.  After a stint in the East Village, she now lives in Hoboken, NJ, with a ridiculously large CD collection.

MELISSA MALAMUT has worked in PR for the NHL and the PGA of America. She was Editor-in-Chief of Touchdown Illustrated magazine and a researcher for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN Books. She held a weekly sports beat for Tribune newspapers while simultaneously working as a beauty editor for an upstart fashion magazine. Malamut has been writing sports, beauty, fashion and lifestyle pieces for 10 years. 

MARK O’DONNELL’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Spy and other journals. His books include GETTING OVER HOMER, LET NOTHING YOU DISMAY, ELEMENTARY EDUCATION and VERTIGO PARK.  He won a Tony as the co-author of the musical HAIRSPRAY.

RICH ORLOFF has written a dozen award-winning full-length comedies (A CAPITAL AFFAIR just closed in Vienna) and oodles of hilarious short plays. Five of his one-act comedies have been published in the annual Best American Short Plays anthology and two in the Best Ten-Minute Playsseries. Playscripts has published 60 of his short plays in eight collections.  His short plays have had over 700 productions on six continents (and a staged reading in Antarctica).  His new comedy SKIN DEEP will be produced by the Foolish Theatre Company in October. www.richorloff.com.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Tetched and Roughhouse. Both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. His new novel, Haywire, is forthcoming from Starcherone, an imprint of Dzanc Books. He teaches literature at City University of New York and fiction writing at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA. www.thaddeusrutkowski.com.

Greg Sanders is the author of Motel Girl: Stories(Red Hen Press, 2008). His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals over the years, with two stories forthcoming in the Writing in Schools anthologies (also Red Hen Press), due out this fall. He’s at work on a second collection of stories, lives in the East Village, and makes his living as a technical writer for Google. More at www.gregorysanders.com.

Drunken! Careening! Writers! is a reading series based on the proposition that readings should be by 1) good writers; 2) who read their work well; and 3) something in it makes people laugh (nervous laughter counts). And 15 minutes tops.

Laura Anne Gilman is the author of more then a dozen novels, including the Nebula-nominated Flesh and Fire and Hard Magic, part of the best-selling “Cosa Nostradamus” urban fantasy series.  She has also sold more than twenty-five short stories, published in magazines and anthologies such as Polyphony and Realms of Fantasy. Her forthcoming novels include Weight of Stone: Book 2 of The Vineart War, and Pack of Lies.

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Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor 2010), the fantasy novel that Jane Austen might have written. In 2008 she received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and in 2009 her story “Evil Robot Monkey” was nominated for the Hugo Award. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Subterranean Press released her short story collection, Scenting the Dark and Other Stories, in 2009.  Mary is also a professional puppeteer.

Mick Lexington -- Mick, a former member of the English rock band Checkpoint Charlie, reads from his upcoming novel Mr. Jack.

Rachel Cline—Rachel is the author of the novels What to Keep and My Liar, both published by Random House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, More, New York, Tin House and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

Gary Lutz—Gary is the author of Stories in the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, and Partial List of People to Bleach. His work has appeared in NOON, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, The Believer, Slate and New York Tyrant. He teaches English and composition at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

Aaron Michael Morales was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, and is a graduate of Purdue University’s MFA program. He has taught Creative Writing, Latin American Literature, Multi-Cultural Literature, Contemporary Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition at a number of colleges, including Columbia College of Chicago, Richard J. Daley College, Robert Morris College, and Purdue University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State University where he teaches Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature. His fiction has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Passages North, and MAKE Magazine, among other places. His first short collection of fiction, titled From Here You Can Almost See the End of the Desert, was published in 2008 by Momotombo Press at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He has authored one novel, Drowning Tucson, and is currently at work on his second, Eat Your Children.

InDigest 1207 was started to further the mission of InDigest Magazine (indigestmag.com): to create a dialogue about the arts, through the arts. By having authors speak to or read from another author who has influenced them--positively or negatively--we hope to show that the process of writing (and reading) is not done in a vacuum, but is an interactive process. Authors have previously brought in e-mails, text messages, song lyrics, paintings, and student writing, as well as poetry and prose by other great authors. 

Brian Trimboli recently graduated from NYU’s MFA program, where he received a fellowship to assist with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Writers Workshop. He has poems forthcoming in The Indiana Review, Third Coast, LIT, and Forklift, Ohio.

Florencia Varela completed her MFA in poetry at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Western Humanities Review, and Washington Square Review. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Eric Kocher is working on his MFA at the University of Houston, where he also will be teaching literature and creative writing. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, H_ngm_n, Rattle, Sixth Finch, and Washington Square Review.

Geoffrey Nutter was born in San Francisco and attended San Francisco State University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His previous books include Water’s Leaves and Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize) and A Summer Evening, winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize. He lives in New York City with his wife, daughter and son. His latest book of poetry is Christopher Sunset.

Sarah Dragonfly Brown came to writing by way of the theater. After training in high school to be an actress she ran away to Chicago with an underground troupe that wrote all their own plays. When she wanted better female roles, they advised her to write her own play and they’d do it. Five full-length plays and one feature film later, Sarah finds herself writing creative nonfiction in NYC. She is currently working on a memoir calledWack-a-doodle Woman, a story about finding dementia care for her free-spirited mom.

Caitlin Leffel is a writer, editor, and co-author of The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas (2006) and NYC: An Owner’s Manual (2008). This year she officially became a bicoastal writer with the publication of Flair, a guide to effortless and elegant entertaining, which she wrote with Los Angeles interior designer Joe Nye. She has written for Blackbook, Time Out New York, Fashion Week Daily, and Mademoiselle, and holds the dubious distinction of being the last intern at that magazine before it folded. She’s a founding member of the online literary happy hour “Five on Friday,” and is a very recent graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.

Crystal Mandler has recently returned to New York after braving four Chicago winters.  She is at work on her first novel, Shelterbelt, the story of a half-Sioux girl desperate to escape her puritanical mother and the isolation of her remote farm in northeastern Montana, where Crystal was partly raised.  Crystal is a 2010 graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.  She is a computer geek by day, though she’s also been a baker, a blueberry-raker, a statistical analyst, a social anthropologist, a caterer, an editor, and a teacher.

Readers will include:

Carolyn Silveira, who currently works at the Freelancers Union in Brooklyn. She studied literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago and has worked in publishing and public radio. She is an Associate Editor of Anderbo.com, where her short story “How James Franco Became My Boyfriend” is at
http://www.anderbo.com/anderbo1/afiction-050.html

Adam Gallari, who is currently working on a novel and pursuing a PhD at the University of Exeter in England. Originally from New York, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and his essays and fiction have appeared in The Quarterly Conversation, The Millions, therumpus, and LIT. His debut collection We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now was published by Ampersand Books in April. His short story “Chasing Adonis” is at
http://www.anderbo.com/anderbo1/afiction-031.html

Anna Lisa McClelland, who has written and performed in comedy shows and plays in London and New York. She wrote the adaptation for The New York Times best-selling writer Nuala O’Faolain’s “My Dream of You”, and her own one-woman show “Anonymous” has been produced at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village and at various comedy theaters in the US. Her novel-manuscript excerpt, “My Accidental AA Meeting” is at
http://www.anderbo.com/anderbo1/andexcerpt5.html

& maybe a poet or three…

Barrelhouse, the Washington, DC-based literary magazine, will present selected readings from its latest issue, which focuses on office life. While it might sound like a boring topic, in the hands of Barrelhouse’s authors, office life becomes, by turns, frightening, confusing, and oddly inspiring.

The reading will include work by the following writers.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the author of five books of poetry including the recently released Everything is Everything. She is the founder of the three-time National Poetry Slam Championship venue, NYC-Urbana and recently authored Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam.

Kilean Kennedy grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Boston. His stories have appeared in such fine places as The Louisville Review, The Mississippi Review Online, Word Riot, Hobart (web), and The Wrong Tree Review. (Kilean’s story will be read by Barrelhouse editor Joe Killiany.)

Rebekah Sankey holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence college where she served as the director of the Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival.

Melissa Yancy’s fiction has appeared in One Story, At Length, Crab Creek Review, Two Letters, and other publications. She is a graduate of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, and currently resides in Los Angeles. (Melissa’s story will be read by actor Sam Falbo.)

With performances by Claire S. Henry, Niketta Scott, and Elizabeth Delvin!  Hosted by Liliana Velásquez.

Deborah Schupack—Deb is the author of the novels Sylvan Street and The Boy on the Bus. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Jana Martin - Jana is the author of Russian Lover and Other Stories. She has published stories in Five Points, Turnstile, Cosmopolitan, Spork and the Misssissippi Review. Glimmer Train gave her its “best new writer award.” She lives in the Catskills

Marta Szabo—Marta has published a memoir: The Guru Looked Good. She is co-director of the Authentic Writing Workshop in Woodstock, New York.

Eric Weinstein’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, and Third Coast. He is an MFA candidate at New York University.

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Adam Eaglin’s poetry and book reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Words Without Borders, Cave Wall, and Harvard Review. He studied as an Elizabeth Leonard Fellow at Boston University, where he received an MFA in poetry, and was a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow in Spain.

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

Catherynne M. Valente, author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Andre Norton Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She is a finalist for the Hugo Award this year. Over the next year she has three novels and a short story collection coming out, as well as short stories in Welcome to Bordertown, Haunted Legends, and the YA vampire anthology Teeth. She’ll be reading from her upcoming novel Deathless.

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M.K. Hobson, the author of over thirty short stories, which have been published or are forthcoming in magazines and anthologies such as SCI FICTION, Realms of Fantasy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Interzone, Digital Domains, Haunted Legends, and Polyphony.  Her debut novel, The Native Star will be out from Bantam Spectra in September, to be followed by a sequel in the summer 2011.  She is one of the co-hosts of Podcastle and is a regular reader for Fantasy Magazine’s podcast series.

Books will be for sale by Bluestockings.

Pamela August Russell is the author of B is for Bad Poetry out now from Sterling Publishing. The Los Angeles Times says “It may not be Walt Whitman, but Miss Russell’s verses are often a whole lot funnier.” Her short stories and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including Virgin Territory and most recently Nothing Moments. She lives in Los Angeles near the freeway.

Jennifer L. Knox’s new book, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is forthcoming in Fall 2010 from Bloof Books. Her other books, Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me, are also available through Bloof. Jennifer was born in Lancaster, California—home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Space Shuttle. She has taught poetry writing at Hunter College and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and many others.

Melissa Broder is the author of WHEN YOU SAY ONE THING BUT MEAN YOUR MOTHER (Ampersand Books, February 2010). She is the chief editor of La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series. By day, she is a publicity manager at Penguin. Her poems appear, or are forthcoming, in many journals, including: Opium, Shampoo, PANK, Five Dials, The Del Sol Review, Word for/Word, Miracle Monocle and Swink. She lives in Brooklyn.

Max Sharam is a resident of both New York City and Sydney, Australia. Her illustrated prose book Snakes Live Under My Bed has sold out pretty much everywhere. Max is also a wildly gifted singer. Her debut solo album A Million Year Girl rocketed to the top of the Australian charts. Her one-woman performance pieces have been part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Hong Kong Fringe Festival and New York Arts Festival. She also has the same bra size as Sharon Stone.

Patrick Costigan is the author of two plays for the San Fransisco Shakespeare Festival introducing young audiences to the enjoyment of Shakespeare without any financial remuneration for himself. His new book of poems THIS with photographs by Heather Hitt will be out as very soon. He lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Our host for the evening will be entertainer and professional storyteller, Dale Seever who invites you to enjoy, some things he enjoys on his regular radio broadcast, brought to you from a third floor walk-up on the foul banks of the Gowanus. (Otherwise known as James Bewley)

Bar closed to the public.

WELCOME TO A DRAMATIC LITERARY READING featuring selections from the first (EVER) all women’s anthology of tragicomic fiction. The St Petersburg Seven present innovative and insightful dramatic fiction dealing with pain and passion, love and life’s epiphanies and momentous moments, tropisms and tremors, relationships and revelations. Each author masterfully plays with comedy and tragedy showing us how these forms date, engage, and no-nup marry.

Mona Awad, was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She is a writer of short stories, poems, screenplays in addition to having worked extensively as a journalist. Mona’s fiction and articles have appeared in a variety of publications, among them: The Walrus, Utne Reader, Maisonneuve, Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tidings, onAir and Matrix where she was the winner and recipient of the Matrix/SLS Editors’ Choice Award for Fiction in 2009. Mona is currently finishing her MScR in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Much of Mona’s work focuses on the seismic psychosexual, and the tragicomic details, twists and turns that occur in personal, social and family encounters and relationships.

Naveen Bahar Choudhury, playwright and fiction writer, was born in Washington, D.C. and now lives in NYC. Her plays have been produced and developed by venues such as Ensemble Studio Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, The Lark Play Development Center, The New Federal Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Source, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and Desipina & Co. Naveen was a finalist for The Public Theater’s 2008 Time Warner Emerging Writers Group. As an active participant in the South Asian American theatre community, a member of SALAAM Theatre, and alumna member of Desipina & Co., Naveen’s work explores female anti-heroes, and the lives of 21st Century American immigrants and their descendants from a tragicomic perspective. Naveen received her MFA in playwriting from the Actors Studio Drama School & is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

Jackie Delamatre, born in Louisiana, is an educator at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. Jackie has taught fiction writing for ,Brooklyn’s Sackett Street Writers Workshop, and New York University from which she holds an MFA in the same subject. Jackie’s work relies on her observations of friends and relatives. She focuses on details of neuroses and expands from there to make as many assessments of the world as she can glean from such a small sample size. Jackie pays as much close attention to plot as she can muster and far more to her characters’ insides. Jackie has been published in New York Press and CapGun, among other publications.

Christina Nichol spent most of her twenties studying animal husbandry in the former Soviet Republics. Retiring from her life as a Kyrgyz yak herder, she now lives in Florida where she is getting her MFA in creative writing and studying how to herd alligators. Christina has worked on documentary projects and has just completed a tragicomic novel set in the Republic of Georgia. It has been described as containing “crystalline descriptions of the everyday life in Georgia.” Christina’s highly original work is full of dark humor, and has been called “impressively fluid,” with the ability to evoke the totally absurd.

Faye Ran, born in Havana, Cuba, is a professor of literature, media and cultural studies, a writer/director, & art curator of a small NYC SoHo gallery. Faye, a former Fulbright Theatre Scholar, AFI Screenwriting Fellow and winner of the Goodman Award for Playwriting, has in hyphenated capacities as a producer/writer/ director produced over 100 plays, films, videos, and multimedia productions on Off-Off Broadway and at international theatre & art festivals and curated over 175 art exhibitions. Her book, The Tragi-comic Passion, is a history & analysis of tragicomedy & tragicomic characterization in drama, film and literature. Both Faye’s creative and academic work reflect an interest in new genres, experimental narrative and hybridity of form. Faye has two PhDs (Columbia University in English & Comparative Literature & NYU in Media Ecology- Culture & Communication) 7 Masters, and an MBA (like Yentl but without the singing).

Rebecca Schiff, a native New Yorker, lives and teaches in Brooklyn. Sam Lipsyte has described her work as “quick, funny, heartbreaking and mean, usually all at once.” Rebecca holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she received a Henfield Award and a Berg Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Fence, Guernica and in the anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York. She is currently an adjunct instructor of English at Kingsborough Community College. Rebecca spends a lot of time thinking about the sentence, both when writing fiction and when grading student work. Her work is both achingly poignant and funny at the same time.

Izida Zorde is a Russian-born writer, curator, and the editor of FUSE magazine — an arts and culture magazine based in Toronto. Working for the past ten years as an editor and curator in the visual arts, Izida’s critical work explores politically engaged arts practices, neo-liberal economics and participatory democratic models. As a fiction writer, Izida’s strikingly original series of stories tell the tragicomic history and struggles of a family that immigrates from Russia to Winnipeg ten years before the fall of Soviet Communism and on the dime of United Jewish Appeal (PROUD TO ASK! PROUD TO GIVE!). Izida received her Masters in Sociology from the University of Toronto and studied translation at Moscow State University.

Jaffe Cohen is an award-winning standup comic (Funny Gay Males), screenwriter ("Hit and Runway") and novelist (Tush) but he’s most proud of his ability to make complete strangers laugh by sticking out his bottom teeth and making a face like his dog. 

Jessica DuLong is the author of My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work that Built America, A Personal and Historical Journey,winner of the 2010 ASJA Outstanding Book Award for memoir. In the book, which melds memoir, history, and reportage, DuLong recounts her transition from building websites to running the five 600-hp diesels aboard retired NYC fireboat John J. Harvey, using her story as a vehicle for tracing the country’s movement away from hands-on work toward an increasingly more virtual, screen-focused society. A mechanic’s daughter and Stanford graduate who bridges blue-collar and white-collar worlds, DuLong is one of the world’s few female fireboat engineers, and a journalist whose work has appeared in a diversity of publications, from Rolling Stone to Today’s Machining World. www.myriverchronicles.com www.fireboat.org

PENolan is the name Tricia began using when her ex-husband demanded a clause in their divorce decree requiring her to write under a pseudonym all because of a story she read at Drunken! Careening! Writers! As part of the research for her memoir, Tricia has been using her blog, Menopausal Stoners, to determine what an individual can say on the internet about a recognizable person and still avoid prosecution. She is currently working on The Menopausal Stoners Guide to Parenting, and really truly intends to start submitting stories somewhere in the very near future.

Shawn Stewart Ruff is the author of two novels---Finlaterand the just-released Toss and Whirl and Pass---and a devoted short-story writer. He is also the editor of Go the Way Your Blood Beats: Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African American Writers. He lives and works in New York City.

LAUNCH PARTY FOR TUNE IN TOKYO: THE GAIJIN DIARIES by TIM ANDERSON
An evening of elegant smut and smoove grooves, with a reading by the author, plus a story by Kristen Elde (BUST, The Nervous Breakdown), music from Edmund II, and maybe some pie?

Visit the Tune in Tokyo website at www.tuningintokyo.com.

Tim Anderson has done many amazing things in his short life. Well, two amazing things. OK, one thing that he did twice. But he’s got nothing on his older brother, who can play his teeth like a xylophone with his thumb.  Tim has made a name for himself writing for small publications that hit the stands, cause a splash, and then die die die, among them Raleigh, NC’s Spectator, The Hatchet, Brightleaf: A Southern Review of Books, and Lather Weekly. He has also been a contributing writer to Seattle’s Resonance, which amazingly is still alive. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and was inducted into both Phi Beta Kappa and the Golden Key National Honor Society. These distinctions have yet to pay off.  Tim is an editor in New York. He blogs at seetimblog.blogspot.com.

Kristen Elde has been published in magazines such as BUST, Health, Runner’s World, Running Times, Shape, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest, in addition to Web publications that include McSweeneys, The Nervous Breakdown, The Northville Review, Pindeldyboz, and Word Riot. She’s also the keeper of The Sublet Blog (www.subletblog.blogspot.com), where she compiles stories of disgruntled subletters and sublessees. Kristen proudly calls Brooklyn home and is currently obsessed with jalapeno poppers.

Through his underground prowess of the past 12 years, Edmund II has been spotted sharing stages with Guided by Voices, Ted Leo, Matt Pond, the Frogs, and the Lemonheads.  Starting his music career in the midwest, Edmund II relocated and commenced “rocking out” in the infamous North Carolina scene.  While truly beginning to develop a specialized approach to his own music he’s sat in and collaborated with bands such as the Rosebuds (Merge Records), Bowerbirds, and Megafaun.  Relocating once again, this time in Brooklyn, Edmund II took a substantial writing sabbatical in the fall of ‘09 before recording his first proper solo record “Floating Monk.” Conceptually in the works for roughly 3 years, the record is due to be released in the fall of ‘10.  With influences such as Luiz Bonfa, Nick Drake, Tortoise, Shellac, and Sigur Ros, Edmund II has begun to artfully balance the complexities of these ingredients on “Floating Monk”. It’s delicate, it’s rich, it moves with intent.  It’s tasteful, it’s flavorful, and beautifully dark.

Daniel Young —Daniel, a recent MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, has published stories in a number of magazines, large and small.

Michael Hearst -- Michael has published stories in McSweeney’s, Parenthetical Note, Hotel St. George and other pubs. He is a founding member of the band One Ring Zero. During a recent solo performance in Bryant Park, he played an instrument without touching it.

Alex Samets— Alex, a newly minted MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, has published her work on-line and in hardcopy. She lives in Inwood and frequents The Flying Pig Bookstore, when in the vicinity of Shelburne, Vt.

Elizabeth Marie Young received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley. Her first full-length book of poetry, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, was released by Fence Books in 2009. She currently a professor at Wellesley College.

Christie Ann Reynolds is a native New Yorker and has an MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her chapbook idiot heart was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2008 New School Chapbook contest. She is the coauthor of a chapbook forthcoming from The Corresponding Society Press and another titled, Revenge Suite is forthcoming with Supermachine Editions. Her work can be found in BlazeVox, La Petite Zine, So and So, EOAGH, The Houston Literary Review, Pax American, Sink Review and others. She teaches at Hofstra University.

Ben Mirov lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has poems in, or forth-coming from Fou, Opium Magazine, Forklift Ohio, The Best American Poetry Blog, Washington Square, Saltgrass and The Agriculture Reader. His chapbook I is to Vorticism won the Diagram/New Michigan Press 2009 chapbook contest. He is editor of pax americana. He is also poetry editor of LIT Magazine. Sometimes he blogs at isaghost.blogspot.com.

InDigest 1207 was started to further the mission of InDigest Magazine (indigestmag.com): to create a dialogue about the arts, through the arts. By having authors speak to or read from another author who has influenced them--positively or negatively--we hope to show that the process of writing (and reading) is not done in a vacuum, but is an interactive process. Authors have previously brought in e-mails, text messages, song lyrics, paintings, and student writing, as well as poetry and prose by other great authors.