KGB Bar

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 An excerpt from her unpublished novel Goldenland Past Dark won the Bronx Writers Center Chapter One award in 2006; the complete manuscript was nominated for a Pushcart Editor’s Book Award in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.