Columbia Selects at KGB Bar

Thursday, March 1, 2018, 7pm, 85 E 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

Curated by Bryan VanDyke and Emily Austin.

What is Columbia Selects? The first Thursday of each month the Columbia MFA program hosts a reading series featuring Writing Program alumni. These fresh talents 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 2019!

Our lineup this month:

Umair Kazi‘s translations of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have appeared in Circumference: Poetry in Translation, Pleiades, and Inventory. His interview with the author Mohsin Hamid was published in Guernica. He has a JD from the University of Iowa College of Law, and an MFA from the Columbia University School of the Arts. He’s currently working on a novel about the kidnapping and captivity of his auto-fictional protagonist by the literary deep state, and a collection of short stories about people who are terrified of bridges. He grew up in Karachi and Iowa and now lives in New York.

E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. Her essay “Hair Piece” was a nonfiction honorable mention in the New Millennium Writings 36th Competition, and her short nonfiction piece “Vulnerable” was the winner of the 2018 Eldridge Tide & Pilot Book Story Contest. E.B. also writes a monthly series, called Non-Fiction by Non-Men, for the site Fiction Advocate, where she interviews women who write nonfiction. E.B. is currently working on a narrative nonfiction book about the unusual and creative ways that people mourn and remember their pets around the globe, investigating everything from mummification to taxidermy to cloning to animal fur sweaters to pet cemeteries. Learn more about E.B. at ebbartels.com.

Arielle Angel is a Miami-born, Brooklyn-based writer. She has been awarded residencies at Hub-Bub, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Brush Creek Foundation, Jentel, and Abode Farm. She was also a 2016 Tent Creative Writing Fellow at The Yiddish Book Center. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Off Assignment, Protocols, Poor Claudia, and Jewish Currents.

http://www.kgbbar.com/

Come for the talent. Stay for the camaraderie and cocktails.