The new year promises wondrous books and remarkable writers, including a poet laureate, at the February 16th Sunday Salon NYC. Join us for what will be an incandescent 2020 kickoff event at Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St. At 3pm.
Peter Kispert’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in OUT magazine, GQ, Esquire, Playboy, The Carolina Quarterly, The Journal, Slice, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Indiana University’s MFA program, where he taught undergraduate fiction writing workshops, and an assistant editor at American Short Fiction. He lives in New York.
Marguerite Maria Rivas, a native New Yorker, is a poet, researcher, and essayist. Her work has been published in anthologies, journals, and periodicals. She is the author of a book of poetry, Tell No One: Poems of Witness (Chimbarazu Press). Rivas has received numerous grants and awards, including The Marg Chandler Memorial Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation and grants from CUNY and the Staten Island Arts Council. She was twice named a finalist for International Poetry Award Rita Dove Prize and was cited by the New York State Assembly for her contribution to the literary arts. Rivas has just finished a second volume of poetry, Rapid Transit, which she hopes to have published in 2020. She is an Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College and is the Poet Laureate of Staten Island.
Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain. The novel, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK), was selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits time between Bangkok and Brooklyn.
René Georg Vasicek is the author of The Defectors. He grew up in the pine barrens of eastern Long Island and has lived in New York City since the Nineties. His writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Hinterland, Bellevue Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, Gargoyle, Mid-American Review, Barrelhouse, Post Road, and elsewhere. René earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and was awarded an NEA fellowship. He is an adjunct lecturer at Lehman College in the Bronx and BMCC in Manhattan. He lives in Astoria, Queens with his wife and two sons.
