KGB Bar

TRUE STORY: Nonfiction at KGB is back from its winter hiatus with another season of fantastic nonfiction writers and storytellers! 

Please join us on Tuesday, February 2nd at 7pm for readings by Robin Romm (THE MERCY PAPERS) and Richard McCann, two writers who explore the perils of the corporal body, confronting mortality in themselves and in those they love.  (It’s February-- did you expect sunshine and songbirds??)

The Mercy Papers is a wrenching chronicle of the three weeks before Robin’s mother’s death from cancer. Angry, heartbroken, exhausted and sad, Robin gives an achingly close recounting of her mother’s final days--alongside vivid memories of her mother’s youth and health-- to create a testament to a daughter’s love, and a validation of the grieving person’s furious reluctance to “just let go.”

ROBIN ROMM is the author of two books. Her memoir, The Mercy Papers, was named a Top Ten Nonfiction Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and Top 100 Nonfiction Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her collection of stories, The Mother Garden, was a finalist for the PEN USA prize and the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award.  Her stories have appeared in numerous national journals (Tin House, One Story, Threepenny Review) and anthologies. She lives in New Mexico with her boyfriend, the writer Don Waters, and their cattle dog, Mercy. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at New Mexico State University.

RICHARD MCCANN will be reading from his work-in-progress, a memoir titled The Resurrectionist, which examines the meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient.  He is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1933 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More ‘Poets for Life’ Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000.  He has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, on whose Board of Trustees he served from 2000-2008.