Sunday Salon » Writers Bios

Kio Stark

nnoveno — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:46:46 +0000

When she is not writing fiction, Kio Stark writes about relational technology and teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program for geeks, hackers, and artists. Her fiction has been published in Joyland and Swink. She has written about feminism, NYC night court, the history of documentary, graphic novels, failure and her favorite saints for The Nation, Killing the Buddha, Feed, Lime Tea and other publications and wrote the introduction to Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, a collection of vernacular police photography. She spent a racetrack season in Miami interviewing old thugs for her doctoral work in American Studies at Yale. She’s currently working on a handbook for independent learning called Don’t Go Back to School and a new novel. Follow Me Down is her first novel. www.kiostark.com.

Daniel Nester

nnoveno — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:43:48 +0000

Daniel Nester most recent book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction called “hilarious” and “actually funny.” His first two books, God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third book, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of poems. His work has appeared in such places as Poets & Writers, Salon, The Morning News, McSweeney’s, The Daily Beast, The Rumpus, the Poetry Foundation website and Bookslut, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll. He is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. He is managing editor of the group culture-slash-literature blog We Who Are About To Die. Find him online at danielnester.com and on Twitter.

When she is not writing fiction, Kio Stark writes about relational technology and teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program for geeks, hackers, and artists. Her fiction has been published in Joyland and Swink. She has written about feminism, NYC night court, the history of documentary, graphic novels, failure and her favorite saints for The Nation, Killing the Buddha, Feed, Lime Tea and other publications and wrote the introduction to Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, a collection of vernacular police photography. She spent a racetrack season in Miami interviewing old thugs for her doctoral work in American Studies at Yale. She’s currently working on a handbook for independent learning called Don’t Go Back to School and a new novel. Follow Me Down is her first novel. www.kiostark.com.

Suzzy Roche

nnoveno — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:41:31 +0000

Suzzy Roche is a singer/songwriter/performer/ and founding member of the singing group The Roches. She has recorded over fifteen albums, written music for TV and Film, and toured extensively for thirty years all across the U.S. and Europe. Zero Church: an unusual collection of prayers (a collaboration with Maggie Roche) which was developed at Harvard’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue was originally staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and has been staged around the country. Suzzy has been an associate member of The Wooster Group; the experimental theater company based in New York City, and performed with them off and on for years throughout Europe. Her children’s book Want To Be In A Band (Random House) will be published in January 2013. Wayward Saints (Hyperion/Voice) is her first novel and is a selection of the Spring 2012 B&N Discover Great New Writers Program. For more information on suzzy: www.suzzyroche.com.

Marlon James

nnoveno — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:39:37 +0000

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970. His second novel, The Book Of Night Women was a National Book Critics Circle Award fiction finalist, a NAACP Image Award Finalist, and winner of the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2010 Minnesota Book Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His short fiction has appeared in Iron Balloons, Bronx Noir, and Silent Voices, and his essays have been published in New Orleans: What Can’t Be Lost, and Publishers Weekly. Marlon James teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Macalester College, St.Paul Minnesota and is working on his third novel.

Marco Buscaglia

jinwonchung — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:23:04 +0000

Marco Buscaglia earned his MA in Writing from DePaul University in 2009. He has worked as a reporter, producer and editor at Tribune Co. since 1994. His stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald, among others. Buscaglia’s fiction and poetry have run in the Chicago Reader, Druid’s Cave and other publications. He is currently an adjunct composition instructor at Roosevelt University and lives in Chicago with his wife and their four children.

Billy Lombardo

jinwonchung — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:18:06 +0000

Billy Lombardo is the author of The Man with Two Arms, How to Hold a Woman, The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns. His forthcoming YA novel, The Day of the Palindrome, will be published by Razorbill in 2013. Billy is the 2011 recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for the Short Story. He is the founder and managing editor of Polyphony H.S., a student-run international literary magazine for high school writers and editors. He teaches at the Latin School of Chicago.

Christine Sneed

jinwonchung — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:53:06 +0000

Christine Sneed‘s first book, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize in short fiction and was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, first fiction category. It has been awarded Ploughshares magazine’s first book award and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in the traditionally published short fiction category. Her second book, a novel titled Little Known Facts, will be published by Bloomsbury Press in early 2013. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Southern Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly Online, Notre Dame Review and a number of other journals. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at DePaul University and Northwestern University and lives in Evanston.

Josh Rolnick

nnoveno — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:52:58 +0000

Josh Rolnick’s debut short story collection, Pulp and Paper, won the 2011 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, selected by Yiyun Li. His stories have won the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize. They have also been published in Harvard Review, Western Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, and Storyville, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. Rolnick holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. He is publisher of Sh’ma, a journal of Jewish ideas, and editor of Unstuck, an independent literary annual. Rolnick has previously worked as a reporter or editor for publications including the Associated Press, Congressional Quarterly, Moment, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He is a frequent day-guest lecturer in fiction writing classes at the University of Akron, and a proud inductee of the Akron Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He currently divides his time between Akron, OH and Brooklyn, NY, where he lives with his wife and three sons. His website is www.joshrolnick.com.

Sunil Yapa

nnoveno — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:51:43 +0000

Sunil Yapa is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program in Fiction, where he was selected for two Hertog Fellowships and the Alumni Scholarship awarded to one fiction student every three years. He has received scholarships to the Norman Mailer Writers’ Center, The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Interviews, reviews and fiction have appeared in The Tottenville Review, The Multicultural Review, Pindeldyboz, and Hyphen Magazine. He was the 2010 winner of the Asian American Short Story Award, and is currently finishing a novel set during one day of anti-corporate protests in Seattle, November 1999.

Leora Skolkin-Smith

nnoveno — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:50:19 +0000

Leora Skolkin-Smith’s first published novel, Edges was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley’s own imprint at Glad Day books. Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award by Grace Paley. The Fragile Mistress, a feature film based on Edges, is currently in pre-production, scheduled to begin shooting on location in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York, produced by Triboro Pictures, directed by Michael Gunther, http://www.thefragilemistress.com. Articles by Leora Skolkin-Smith have appeared in The Washington Post, Psychology Today, The National Book Critic’s Circle, “Critical Mass”, “Readysteadybook.com”, the Quarterly Review. Excerpts from Hystera were first published by Persea Books, and recently appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review. Recent publications include a piece from The Fragile Mistress, which appeared in Guernica Magazine in 2010.