These Folks Have Appeared At The Disagreement …

Rachel Pelz holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She is currently at work on a novel.

Samuel Cooper was born in Alabama; he moved to Nashville, then to New Jersey and, finally, to Brooklyn. He has three current projects: a musical setting of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience; a dissertation on political imagination and science in Plato and some Romantic poets; and a novel about falling in love with future life-forms.  His reading was an excerpt from that novel.

Antonio Aiello is the editor of PEN.org, the online voice of PEN American Center. He writes fiction and nonfiction, all too often about his mother. You can find his story, “Ron’s Gone,” on Anderbo.com.

Grant Ginder is the author of the novels This Is How It Starts and Driver’s Education, which was released this January. He received his MFA from NYU, where he teaches expository writing. He lives in New York City. His story, “A Psychopharmaceutical Guide to Loss,” was published by Bodega.

Kate Hill Cantrill’s writing has appeared in literary publications such as Story Quarterly, Salt Hill, The Believer, Blackbird, QuickFiction, Mississippi Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Swink, Wigleaf and others. She has been awarded fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the Jentel Artists Residency, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the James A. Michener Fund. She curates the Rabbit Tales Reading and Performance series in DUMBO, Brooklyn and she recently published her first story collection, Walk Back From Monkey School from Press 53. Her story, “Lumbering Beasts,” can be found in that collection.

Cliff Benston got his MFA from NYU in May 2012.  He’s had work published in Sleepingfish and The Fiddleback, and has completed a novel called Nixon in Love, which is about what it sounds like it’s about. The story he read was entitled, “Jill and Mom.”

Rebecca Bates was born and raised in Houston, went to college in Memphis, and moved to New York for grad school at Fordham University, where she received a MA in English Literature. She is a former editor at Guernica Magazine, and now works on the website at Architectural Digest. She read to us from her cycle of poems, “The Julian Nodes.”

Katherine Carlson’s work has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Fiction Writers Review. After four years in the editorial departments of St. Martin’s Press and Viking, she moved to the other side of the desk to earn an MFA in Fiction from the NYU Creative Writing Program. She now teaches in NYU’s Expository Writing Program and is wrapping up work on her first novel. She tweets about her love for Frank Ocean and George Saunders at @katcarl. Her story was entitled, “In The Manner Of …” You can find more of her work here.

Reineke Hollander is a visual artist and writer who was born in the Netherlands and has lived in Brooklyn since 1986. She has worked as a translator, and as a journalist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC-Handelsblad.  She recently completed a writing fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.  She is currently working on a fictionalised memoir about growing up  in the Netherlands after World War II and in  the Sixties, tentatively titled Behaving Well in Times of War. Further information can be viewed at reinekehollander.com. Her reading was a selection from that memoir.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched and Roughhouse.Haywire reached No. 1 on Small Press Distribution’s fiction best-seller list. BothTetched and Roughhouse were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. He teaches at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan. He was awarded a 2012 fellowship in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He read his story, “Warts and All.” More info can be found at www.thaddeusrutkowski.com.

Victoria Matsui is an editor at Little, Brown and Company. She has previously worked at Poets & Writers Magazine and BookCourt bookstore. Her story “Good Friends” was published in Esopus in 2012, and she has been milking it for all it’s worth ever since. She lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Alice Moran is a painter who sometimes gets crazy urges to make films and sculptures. She received her BA from Bowdoin College and her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. You can see more of her work atsarahmoran.com. Her short film was entitled “One More Bite.”

Elizabeth L. Davis is a fiction writer and first year MFA candidate at NYU Paris Writer’s Workshop.  She is currently working on a novel about a lonely alien.  She read from her story “Monster Mash.”

Marie-Helene Bertino’s collection of short stories SAFE AS HOUSES received The 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award, judged by Jim Shepard, and was published in October of 2012.  She received The Pushcart Prize in 2007 and a Special Mention in 2011.  She has taught for The Gotham Writer’s Workshop and One Story’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop and was an Emerging Writer Fellow at NYC’s Center for Fiction.  She hails from Philly and lives in Brooklyn.  Currently, she is a biographer for people living with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).  For more information, visitwww.mariehelenebertino.com, or follow her @mhbertino. She read from her story “Sometimes You Break Theirs Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours.”

Kayla Rae Whitaker is originally from Eastern Kentucky and has an MFA in fiction from New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Joyland, B O D Y, Bodega, Burnt Bridge, and Still. She recently appeared alongside such luminaries as Lynyrd Skynyrd in the History Channel’s southern culture documentary “You Don’t Know Dixie.” She is currently at work on a novel about raging lady cartoonists. You can also find her on Twitter @kaylarwhitaker.

Brady Huggett lives in New York and works as an editor. His fiction has appeared in a few quiet places online. More writing: www.thehuggettfiles.blogspot.com. Follow:@addisonbench. He read his story, “Cold But Alive.”

Lynn Strong lives in Brooklyn with her husband, their daughter, and their dog. She teaches Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University. You can find an earlier version of the piece she read, now entitled “Practicing, here.

N. Michelle AuBuchon holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gawker, No News Today, Swink, and Washington Square.  She is currently working on a novel-in-stories. You can find her story, “Remember Me,” here.

Maxim Loskutoff grew up in Missoula, Montana. After graduating from Pomona College, he worked in hospitals in Dallas and Chicago, on political campaigns, and in the Middle East. He received his MFA from NYU where he was a Veteran’s Writing Fellow. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Witness, Willow Springs, Slice, Hobart, and The Minnesota Review among other publications. He’s been awarded fellowships and residencies from NYU Abu Dhabi and the Jentel Arts Colony. His story, “Harvest,” is forthcoming from Hobart.

Nicole Callihan writes poems, stories and essays. Her work has appeared in, among others, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salt Hill, inDigest, North American Review, The L Magazine and Cream City Review and has been translated into German and Spanish. A Senior Language Lecturer at New York University, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughters. Her first book of poems, Super Loop, will be published by Sock Monkey Press in early 2014. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com.

Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The American Reader, Tin House’s Open Bar, Five Chapters, Best Women’s Erotica 2012,VICE, The Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Philadelphia, but she lives on the internet here.

Alex Morris was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama and received an MFA in poetry from NYU. He has worked for New Orleans Review and McSweeney’s Poetry Series. He runs the Southern Writers Reading Series, which takes place the second Wednesday of each month. He lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Hanssen’s film and video works have shown at festivals, museums and screenings throughout North America, Asia and Europe. She received her Masters of Fine Art in film and video at the Massachusetts College of Art. In addition to her artwork, she teaches at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and mothers her three kids.

J.T. Bushnell was named a top-ten emerging fiction writer by Storyville.com in 2012. His fiction has appeared most recently in New Madrid, The South Carolina Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review. He also writes craft essays forPoets & Writers, The Writer, and Fiction Writers Review, where he is a contributing editor. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches at Oregon State University.

Aaron Smith is a reporter at CNNMoney where he covers Wall Street, the gun industry and white collar crooks like Bernie Madoff. Before he went to college to study creative writing, he thruhiked the Appalachian Trail and joined the circus. He traveled with Ringling Brothers and the Big Apple Circus, living on the train and setting up the big top. Now he lives in Brooklyn with his rock star wife and brand new son. Originally from Florida, he has always been obsessed with alligators.

Tracy O’Neill is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Literarian,Vol.1 Brooklyn, and Promethean. In 2012, she was awarded the NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship by the Center for Fiction. She currently teaches at the City College of New York.

The new collection of one-page fictions, You Are Make Very Important Bathtime by David Moscovich, is available from Journal of Experimental Fiction (Geneva, IL). Moscovich lives with chronic insomnia in New York City and runs Louffa Press, a micro-press dedicated to printing innovative fiction.

Marina Weiss is a research assistant in the department of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. She is the poetry editor of the magazine formerly known as Explosion-Proof, and her poetry is published or forthcoming in Tin House,Narrative, Canteen, Paper Darts, Painted Bride Quarterly, dislocate, and elsewhere.

Lizzie Harris‘  first collection is Stop Wanting (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). She’s a poetry editor for Bodega Magazine.

Hannah Sloane’s fiction and essays have appeared in: Monkeybicycle, Freerange Nonfiction, Nerve, The Good Men Project, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She lives in New York and is currently working on her first novel.

Lilly O’Donnell grew up just a few blocks from here, and has been writing about this neighborhood for about as long as she can remember. Now she’s a bartender, and is working on her first book, a heavily-reported memoir about her artist father’s life and work. Her freelance writing has appeared in New York magazine, VICE, BUST, and The New Inquiry.

Michael Keenan’s first book of poems, “Translations On Waking In An Italian Cemetery,” will be released by A-Minor Press in the spring of 2014. His writing has appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, Fence, Alice Blue Review, RealPoetik, NYQ Reviews, Umbrella Factory Magazine, inter|rupture, Shampoo, Paul Revere’s Horse, and Arsenic Lobster, among others. Michael no longer drives a waffle truck in Northern Florida, but he wishes that he did.

Cat Richardson’s work has appeared in appeared in Tin House, Four Way Review, and Sonora Review, among others. She’s managing editor of Bodega Magazine  and a poetry editor at Phantom Limb Press. She likes you just fine.

Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collection, Doll Palace, forthcoming this September from Dock Street Press. A 2012 NYFA Fiction Fellow, her work has appeared in The Good Men Project, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Slice Magazine, Wigleaf, PANK, Joyland, Big Muddy, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere. For more, visit saralippmann.com.

Molly O’Brien is a writer in Brooklyn who has been published in places like PANK, Paper Darts, and Illuminati Girl Gang. Once a Thought Catalog commenter called her ‘everything that is wrong with the internet,’ which she has chosen to take as a compliment.

Rebecca Mills is a New York based actor/writer (member: AEA, SAG-AFTRA). She recently completed Warning: Don’t Laugh at the Natives, a comedic memoir based on a decade of misadventures in New York City. She has performed excerpts of the book in a one-woman show called “Charmed” at The Peoples Improv Theatre. Additionally, she has performed some of the stories at the Moth, in their New York StorySlams, and most recently at Renegade Reading Series, Honey and Poison, Stoop to Nuts at Cornelia Street Cafe, Rabbit Tales, Muffins in the Window, and Drunken! Careening! Writers! at KGB. As an actor, Mills has has performed her own (fictional) work at Joe’s Pub and the Laurie Beechman Theatre. Mills is also a wine writer

Writer/Director Kirsten Kearse’s film and video works include the shorts Andalusiaville, What’s That Smell and her completed Horsefingers Trilogy: Horsefingers, Horsefingers 2: But I Am The Tiger, and Horsefingers 3: Starfucker.  They’ve traveled the film festival circuit screening at large industry festivals (Seattle International, Edinburgh International, Slamdance) as well as at more radical underground festivals (Calgary, Boston, Athens). Her most recent work, Why Not, Vermont, is soon to make its debut. She is a MacDowell Fellow and currently splits her time between LA and NY.

Brittany Goss has published writing in Joyland Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Bellingham Review, and Grasslimb Journal. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and has received support for her writing from the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories, which includes “Beauty Queens” and “A Simple Life”.  More information can be found at brittanygoss.com.

Miles Klee is a reporter for the Daily Dot and author of the novel Ivyland, a finalist in the 2013 Tournament of Books. He contributes to Vanity Fair and Lapham’s Quarterly, while his short fiction has appeared in 3:AM, Unstuck, The White Review, Birkensnake, The Collagist, and Pinball.

Susannah Kemple works at The New Yorker magazine where, in the words of a friend, “It’s not like you actually write stuff. Oh, that came out harsh. Let’s talk about something else. Are you going to finish all your nachos?” Prior to coming to writing, Susannah worked as a German translator and a restorative justice study coordinator , and trained as a puppeteer with an avant-garde company, a job at which she did not excel.

Adam Dalva is a graduate of NYU’s MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. He has written a novel, The Zero Date, and was an Associate Fellow at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. His work has been published in The Millions, Bodega, Connu, and elsewhere. Adam is also an 18th century French antiques dealer.

Jesse Wakeman is a New York based actor and artist, who recently completed his MFA at Columbia University. As an actor, Jesse has appeared in numerous shorts and feature films, and is currently collaborating with Kris on the feature version of Donald Cried. More info can be found at: www.jessewakeman.com.

Kris Avedisian is an award winning filmmaker who lives and works in Rhode Island. He has won awards at Slamdance, The Boston Film Festival, and various festivals. He is currently working with Jesse on the feature version of Donald Cried, to be shot in winter 2015.www.donaldcried.com

Emily Cementina received her M.F.A. in Fiction from The New School. She co-hosts Sunday Salon, a monthly reading series in the East Village. Emily lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with her husband and their pet fish, Mingus.

Dustin Luke Nelson is the author of the forthcoming collection “in the office hours of the polar vortex” (Robocup Press, 2015). His 90-minute performance film “STRIKE TWO” debuted with Gauss PDF in April and his performance piece “Applause” debuted at the Walker Art Center’s Open Field in June. There’s stuff at dustinlukenelson.com about him.

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York, where he is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Tin House, The Collagist, Underwater New York, The Paris Review Daily, Necessary Fiction, Bookforum, The Rumpus, The Collapsar, and Joyland.

Mary Krienke grew up in the Midwest and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Fiction Program and has been previously published by Midwestern Gothic, Joyland, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Best American Poetry Blog, and Underground Voices, with work forthcoming in Palooka. An associate literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, she represents literary fiction and creative nonfiction and is especially drawn to writing that explores the intersection of the body and the mind, the personal and the societal, the cosmological and the spiritual. She is currently writing her first novel.

Nicholas Wright obtained his MFA from Columbia University and has previously been published in Catch-Up Magazine, Print Oriented Bastards, and Apogee Journal. He is a grade-school teacher in NYC where he teaches Language Arts and Creative Writing. He’s been told that his spirit animal is a mountain goat. He has accepted this association. Nicholas lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Michael Keenan’s first book of poems, “Translations On Waking In An Italian Cemetery,” was released by A-Minor Press in 2014. His writing has appeared in Poetry International, the PEN Poetry Series, Fence and Alice Blue Review, among others. He currently talks to people at Columbia University and the New School.

Alexandra Kleeman lives and writes on the north shore of Staten Island. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Guernica, Tin House, and n+1.  You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, a debut novel about identity theft, snack cakes, and double Jesuses, will be published by Harper in Summer 2015.

Allie Werner lives in Brooklyn and works in the basement of a museum. Her work has appeared most recently in NANO Fiction, Corium, and Hobart.

Rumaan Alam’s stories have appeared in Crazyhorse, StoryQuarterly, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Marianne Mckey is a recent graduate from The New School’s MFA program in creative writing. Her other works can be found at The Los Angeles Review, Storm Cellar, and Fiction Fix. In 2010, Marianne was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Frank Weisberg is 29 years old and from Orange County, New York. He holds degrees in Literature and History from SUNY Purchase College and an MFA in Writing from the California College of Arts in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Phoebe and Sparkle + Blink. If you liked his story, please do drop him a line: frankweisberg@yahoo.com

Karen Heuler’s stories appear in literary, fantasy, and science fiction magazines regularly and have won various awards, including an O. Henry. Her 2014 novel,Glorious Plague, was about a strangely beautiful apocalypse, and her second story collection, The Inner City, was chosen as one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly. Karen read “The Lovely Kisselthwist,” which you can find here: http://bit.ly/1FVQBiV

Ron Kolm is a member of the Unbearables, and an editor of several of their anthologies; most recently The Unbearables Big Book of Sex! Ron is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin and the Editor of the Evergreen Review. He is the author ofThe Plastic Factory, Divine Comedy and, with Jim Feast, the novel Neo Phobe. His most recent collection of poems, Suburban Ambush, was published by Autonomedia last year. He’s had work in Hobo Camp Review, Have A NYC 3. theToo Much anthology and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection as part of the Downtown Writers Group. Ron read from his new collection, Duke and Jill. 

Arden Levine lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a reader for Epiphany.  In 2015, her work has appeared or will appear in AGNI Online, Rattle, Bodega Magazine, Emotive Fruition, and the New York City Poetry Festival.  She holds an MPA from New York University and consults to nonprofit organizations.

Nichole LeFebvre won The L Magazine’s Literary Upstart competition and was published in their 2013 Summer Fiction Issue. Her writing has also appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Necessary Fiction, and Bustle.com, and she was runner-up in Columbia’s 2015 nonfiction contest.

Jackie Corley is the founder and publisher of Word Riot (http://www.wordriot.org). Her work has appeared in Redivider, Fourteen Hills, 3AM Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and in various print anthologies. A short story collection, The Suburban Swindle, was published in 2008 by the now-defunct So New Press.

Ben Purkert is a former New York Times Fellow at NYU and has published poems in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Agni, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Fence and elsewhere. He currently teaches creative writing at Rutgers and is working on his first novel. He’s also the founder of CityShelf, an initiative to support indie bookstores. Read a poem from his Disagreement reading, “The Lake Is a Mind with a Shopping Cart in It” here. More at: benpurkert.com.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is a founding editor of Argos Books & co-editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation. She is the author of three chapbooksWhither Weather (GreenTower Press, 2012), Isn’t that You Waving at You (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming in 2015) and Amsterdam (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2015). Her full-length collection Two Suns will be published by The Lit Pub in 2015. She lives in a farmhouse in Connecticut and translates Swedish novels for a living.

Barbara Rosenthal, a native New Yorker, is a prolific, idiosyncratic writer and media/performance artist, referred to as “Media Poet” by The Village Voice and elsewhere since the 1980s. She taught Writing for 22 years at CUNY/Staten Island, Photography for 12 years at Parsons/The New School, and often mixes text with surreal photographic imagery. Such works are in the collections of MoMA, Whitney, Tate, Berlin Kunstbibliotek, etc. Her major image-text books are “Clues to Myself”, “Sensations”, “Homo Futurus” and “Soul & Psyche” (all Visual Studies Workshop Press). Her first novel, “Wish for Amnesia”, is just out now from Deadly Chaps Press, NYC. This novel was drafted 1980-85 and had Anais Nin’s agent, Gunther Stuhlmann, in the early 1990s, but when he died soon after taking on the project, the novel languished until Deadly Chaps discovered its contemporary timeliness. Rosenthal’s performance-and-media art has been reviewed in The NY Times, Village Voice, Flash Art International, etc. She is listed as a Fiction Writer, Poet and Performance Poet in the Poets & Writers’ Directory and in various Who’s Whos. There are articles in Wikipedia and Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes and short stories and poetry have been published in Wood Coin, Poetry Motel, Kopy Kultur, Spit, Hotwire, Women’s Music Plus, E.S.P., Feelings, The MacGuffin Reader, Parting Gifts, Public Illumination, First Corpse, The Big Book of Sex, Live Mag and the upcoming New Unbearables Anthology. She has read in NY at the NY Poetry Festival, KGB, Cafe Vivaldi, Yancy’s, Cornelia Street Cafe, Bowery, and various other underground spaces.

Jay Deshpande is the author of Love the Stranger (YesYes Books, 2015). He has held residencies at the Saltonstall Arts Colony and the Vermont Studio Center and was selected by Billy Collins for the 2015 Scotti Merrill Memorial Award at the Key West Literary Seminar. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Offing, the PEN Poetry Series, Prelude, and elsewhere. Essays and reviews have been published in Slate, The New Republic, The Millions, and Publishers Weekly. He holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia and has taught in Egypt, France, and the United States. Born in Austin, Texas, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Kevin Dugan is a Brooklyn-based journalist covering fraud and corruption on Wall Street. He is currently a reporter at the New York Post, and has written for Bloomberg, the New York Times, Institutional Investor, and others. His foreign reporting on covert CIA prisons in Eastern Europe has been cited by Amnesty International’s Rendition Project, and once won something called a “Human Piss-Bomb” award, because he made some corrupt people mad. He is a 2015 Stanford School of Business media fellow, and currently visiting editor at The New School, where he went to college. He is at work on his first novel.

Erin Swan is a writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has been published in various journals, including Asia Literary Review, CALYX, and The Quarterlife Quarterly. She holds an MA in English Education from Teachers College at Columbia University and is currently completing an MFA in Fiction at the New School for Public Engagement. She has worked in publishing, taught English in South and Southeast Asia, and is now teaching literature and writing in a New York City public high school. You can read her some of her work by clicking the links above.