KGB Bar

Leslie Nipkow came to NY to sing and dance, but wound up playing Erica Kane’s prison guard on All My Children, an experience which inspired her one-woman show, GUARDING ERICA, published in Talk to Me: Monologue Plays (Vintage Books).  Her screenplay, Sara Charlotte, was a Sundance and Chesterfield finalist, and her plays have been performed and read at La MaMa, HERE, the Women’s Project, and the Ohio Theater.  Her essays have been published in the New York Times and FreshYarn.com.

Sarah Deming’s first novel, Iris, Messenger, was published by Harcourt in 2007 and tells the story of a young girl who discovers the Greek gods are living in her suburban Philadelphia town.  A ghostwritten erotic novel of astounding filth will be released this fall from St. Martin’s Press under a pseudonym which she is keeping carefully hidden.  Sarah’s essays on mythology, food, cocktails, art, and sex have appeared in online journals, a Seal Press anthology, and her personal blog The Spiral Staircase.  Before becoming a writer, Sarah was a Golden Gloves boxing champion, pastry chef, and yoga teacher.

Robert Masterson is a former professor of English at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York. Masterson holds both a BA and an MA (with distinction) in English Literature from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; and a weird little academic certificate from Shaanxi Normal University, Xian, Shaanxi Province, the People’s Republic of China. Masterson spent most of his childhood and graduated from high school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where all his parents worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He has visited the Trinity Site southwest of Socorro, New Mexico; the nuclear reactors at Brookhaven and Indian Point, New York; spent the summer of 1993 in Hiroshima, Japan, researching A-bomb survivors; and toured childrens’ hospitals and the Chernobyl site itself in Ukraine in 2000. In addition to university and public school classrooms, Masterson’s teaching has taken him to the People’s Republic of China and inside New Mexico and Colorado state penal institutions. He received the 1987 Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of New Mexico and the first Ted Berrigan Scholarship from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993 and has been a featured workshop leader during the Taos Poetry Festival / World Heavyweight Poetry Bout.