KGB Bar

Stephanie Hart’s recently published book Clouds Like Horses is a series of fast paced vignettes, focusing on her life as well as the lives of her parents and grandparents, dating back to Nineteenth Century Russia. Many of these pieces have appeared in the literary magazines And Then and The Sun. Stephanie’s essays have come out in a number of anthologies, including How Not to Greet Famous People: The Best Stories from ducts.org, Mondo James Dean, and Language Crossings: Negotiating the Self in a Multicultural World. She was a kid’s editor for ducts and is the author of a Young Adult fiction novel. She will have an essay in the winter issue of Jewish Currents. Stephanie teaches writing to International students at FIT and Parsons The New School for Design in Manhattan.
____________________________

Madeleine Beckman is the author of Dead Boyfriends, a poetry collection, Linear Arts Book.  Among her awards, Ms. Beckman has received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant for fiction and a Hemingway Award for Short Story. Phillip Lopate chose her personal essay “A Natural Nemesis,” for the International New Letters Competition.  She has received artist fellowships from the Irish Arts Council (Heinrich Böll Foundation), Fundaçion Valparaiso (Spain), Chateaux de Lesvaux (France) and Ragdale (USA).  Madeleine’s poetry, fiction, and memoirs have appeared nationally and internationally in journals, anthologies, and online, including the anthology What Was I Thinking: 50 Bad Boyfriend Stories (St. Martin’s Press), Southern Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Confrontation, Tempus: A Journal of Literature and the Arts, Webdelsol.com, and eightmillionstories.  She lives in NYC and teaches writing at Hunter College/CUNY and privately.
_______________
Jody Lisberger is the author of the 2008 story collection Remember Love, which The Boston Globe called a “first-rate collection [that] starts out strong and keeps on accelerating.” The Women’s Review of Books said, “after you’ve read several of Lisberger’s stories, you can’t regard the American family with equanimity: any relationship, in Lisberger’s sleight of hand, has the potential to become as pitted with dangers as a minefield. Her suburban landscapes, which at first impression seem comfortingly familiar, disguise rebellious and altogether unruly emotions.” Lisberger’s collection was nominated for a National Book Prize; her story “Crucible” was nominated for a Pushcart.

Lisberger’s stories have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Fugue, The Louisville Review, Confrontation, and Thema. She won finalist and third prizes in fiction contests sponsored by Quarterly West and American Literary Review.

She is currently Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island, and on the fiction faculty of the Brief-Residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University in Louisville.