Because many people are traveling during the summer months, KGB readings will be on hiatus in July and August. We'll resume as usual on the last Friday of September (9/28). We're also planning some other exciting events for all of you so keep and eye out!

Team Paragraph

Come to class with a project in mind and leave with the knowledge and confidence to get it on the web.

Amanda McCormick oversaw the first co-branded web destination for New Directors/New Films, the first "socially networked" website for the New York Film Festival. When not helping individuals and small businesses to develop web presences on a shoestring, she presents to organizations like the 501TechNYC club on bootstrapping websites. She's also created a basic guide to website design at One Hour Website. Her blog can be found here.

Aaron Poochigian earned his Phd in Classics from the University of Minnesota in 2006. Stung With Love, his book of translations from Sappho, was published by Penguin Classics in 2009 (with a preface by Carol Anne Duffy), and he has been awarded an NEA Grant in Translation. Johns Hopkins University Press put out his translations of Aratus' Phaenomena and Aeschylus' early plays in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Able Muse Press published his first book of original poetry, The Cosmic Purr, in March of 2012, and several of the poems in it collectively won the New England Poetry Club's Daniel Varoujan Prize. His work has appeared in such newspapers and journals as the Financial Times, Poems Out Loud and POETRY.

Betty Shamieh's off-Broadway premieres are The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop) and Roar (The New Group), which was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick for four weeks. Shamieh was named a 2011 UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue for artistic excellence and her role in fostering cross-cultural artistic exchanges. Her recent European productions in translation include Again and Against (Playhouse Teater, Stockholm), The Black Eyed (Fournos Theatre, Athens), and Territories (co-production of the Landes-Theatre and the 2009 European Union Capital of Culture Festival). Shamieh was named as a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies in 2006.

Peter Steinberg, an agent at The Steinberg Agency, represents a broad range of novels and short story collections and the occasional YA title. His non-fiction interests include memoir, humor, biography, history, pop culture, fitness and narrative non-fiction. Peter worked for eleven years as a literary agent at a number of high profile boutique literary agencies before forming his own company. Peter began his career as a filmmaker and screenwriter with a B.A. from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts' film school. He is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives.

Known as "The Nomad Junkie," Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a NYC-based poet/dramatist from Queens born to Black & Indian Caribbean couple. His life has been as varied as his ancestry. He studied classical acting (he was kicked out of Juilliard in 1997 for holding the very first ever Black American Theater Seminar in Lincoln Center at the height of the Wilson-Brustein debate) but later turned his attention to directing and creating avant-garde socio-political works for the stage and screen. His theater company, Dionysus 2000, ran at the HERE and the National Black Theater, receiving support from established luminaries such as August Wilson. He became well regarded for his 2001 experimental drama about racism As an Act of Protest, which featured the Last Poets. The film will make its DVD premiere on October 22, 2012. Recently, he wrote and performed Gentrified Minds, staged by Nina Fleck, a spoken-word performance piece about the ominous suburbanization of NYC and the death of the "counter-culture." Kangalee's book Lying Meat: and other poems beneath the oil was published as a chapbook by Savage Paw Press in 2010 and recently re-printed & revised to include his published contributions to the European-based Outlaw Poetry Network.

Amanda Lichtenberg's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Versal, Forklift, Caesura, LUNGFULL!, The November 3rd Club, 5 AM, Schmear the Queer and elsewhere. She has curated poetry readings in New York City at The Louder Arts Project, Makor (92nd St Y) and the Brooklyn Museum. Amanda is a Norman Mailer Center Fellow, Amy Award recipient and received her MFA from New England College. Her current poetry project about her great grandfather, a vaudevillian and blackface comedian, is both obsessing and escaping her.

Bonnie Friedman is the author of the bestselling Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life, which has been anthologized in six different textbooks. She is also the author of the memoir The Thief of Happiness, called "profound" and "compelling" by The Washington Post. Her essays have appeared in literary journals including Ploughshares, Image, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, and have been included in The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Writing on Writing, and The Best Spiritual Writing.

Alexandra Enders worked as a magazine editor and writer before getting an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She's been a Ucross Foundation resident and a finalist in the inaugural cycle of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. Her stories and articles have appeared in BOMB, Hunger Mountain, Critical Quarterly, Elle, Food & Wine, Poets & Writers, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. She is the author of the novel Bride Island (Plume) and is at work on a new novel.

Sara Farrington is a Brooklyn based playwright. Her play Mickey & Sage will premiere at The Incubator Arts Project, Sept 2012 (with mini-tours to NTI @ The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and The Great Plains Theater Conference, Omaha, NE.) Her newest play, Untitled Play About Brecht & His Girlfriends & Boyfriend & Wife, will have a workshop run July/August 2012 at Foxy Films, a performance space she shares with husband Reid Farrington. Other plays include The Vultures (The Weasel Festival, 13th St. Theater), That Stays There (Great Plains Theater Conference 2011 PlayLabs, Little Theater @ Dixon Place, The Bushwick Starr Reading Series), The Death of Evie Avery (FringeNYC), The Rise and Fall of Miles and Milo (FringeNYC, winner: Award for Outstanding Playwriting). Sara is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, the recipient of many Dragon's Egg Artist Residencies and has been on several silent 'pataphysics playwriting retreats with Erik Ehn. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College with Mac Wellman.

Dawn Raffel is the books editor at Reader's Digest, in charge of book excerpts and reviews. She also assigns and edits feature stories and essays, and creates original and curated content across platforms. In addition, she is the web editor of the Center for Fiction, and the editor of The Literarian, the Center's online magazine, which she launched in 2011. Formerly Editor-at-Large for More Magazine and a founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, she is the author of two short story collections and a novel. An illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, is forthcoming in June.

Amy Axler has been writing for a very, very long time. She's had a slew of different jobs, many of which have proved useful providing grist for the writer's mill as well as unemployment benefits. She is currently working on a novel called "The Polish Newspaper." It's a love story. Amy graduated from college in California, and has an MFA from the New School. She blogs at dearpersonalgrocer.com.

Anna Raverat grew up in North Yorkshire and read English at King's College, Cambridge University. In 2008 one of her short stories won a Bridport Prize. Her first novel Signs of Life will be published in April 2012 by Picador and Rowohlt and has been selected as one of the Waterstones 11--the UK's biggest bookseller's selection of the finest debut fiction for 2012. She works as a consultant and lives in London with her three young children.

Antje Oegel worked at the international theater festival, Euro-Scene Leipzig, and at the Schaubuhne Theater in Leipzig before moving to NYC in 2002. In New York, she worked at MCC Theater and at the theater agency, Bret Adams, Ltd. She founded her own agency, AO International in 2008, representing playwrights, directors, and designers from the US as well as other countries, including Young Jean Lee, Thomas Bradshaw, Sibyl Kempson as well as the Heiner Muller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder estates. In 2011 she joined Karinne Keithley Syers in running 53rd State Press, a small press publishing new plays and performance texts.

Neal Ungerleider reports on the Middle East, Africa, and Asia for Fast Company Magazine. His articles have been published in Slate, Foreign Policy, Wired and Saveur.

Bruce Ward is a writer, actor, director and teacher. He has performed his acclaimed solo show Decade: Life in the '80s across the U.S., including in NYC at the HERE performance art cafe and the NYC International Fringe Festival. Bruce has Master's degrees from the New School and Boston University and has thrice been a fellow at VCCA. He is currently working on a memoir, Last Man Standing.

Kirby Kim was an assistant at the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency before he moved on to Vigliano Associates, where he built his list while negotiating the agency's contracts. He is currently at WME where he continues to represent fiction for children and adults, memoir, pop culture, and general nonfiction. Kirby is originally from California, where he attended Pomona College in Claremont and Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He is on the boards of the Asian American Writers Workshop and Kaya Press.

Moscow-born and Bronx-raised, Brooklyn-dwelling Stacy Gueraseva is the author of Def Jam, Inc. (Random House, 2005), about the history of Def Jam Records. She has been writing about music and pop culture for national magazines since 1995. Fun fact: she's an identical twin.

After receiving a degree in Finance and Management from N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business and spending a decade as a sales and marketing guru for technology startups, Adam Chromy decided to blend his love of narrative with his modern entrepreneurial spirit. The result was Artists and Artisans, where for ten years he represented authors with a professional rigor seldom seen in the book business. After hundreds of published books and numerous bestsellers, Adam reorganized Artists and Artisans as a management company to better serve clients by offering them the higher visibility afforded by film and television adaptations of their work. At Movable Type Management, Adam serves as President of Movable Type Media, managing a very exclusive list of authors while developing and producing the adaptations of MTM's clients' work.