A.H. Avouris has a degree in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations with a focus on Egyptology, a large collection of baking pans, and a pile of old New Yorkers.
Alexios Moore is a narrative non-fiction writer and essayist whose work is primarily concerned with the relationship between identity, culture and the environment. His work has been published in various print and online journals including Post Road and H.O.W. Journal where he is a contributing editor. In 2007 he received fellowships from the Edward Albee Foundation and he recently completed a Workspace residency with the Lower Manhattan Culture where he continued work on a memoir, entitled Field Studies, which chronicles the various communities he has called home, from an Alaskan fishing village to a Marxist-Leninist collective in Oakland. As an educator Alexios has fourteen years of teaching, curriculum design and program management experience. He began teaching as an English teacher in Brooklyn high schools in the early 90’s and as a teaching artist for Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Since then he has managed educational programs for non-profits like Children’s Aid Society and Center for the Urban Environment, overseeing curriculum design, instructor training and program delivery. Currently, he teaches in the first-year writing program and Eugene Lang College and oversees the core English curriculum at the College of New Rochelle’s Brooklyn campus.
Alex is the Founder of Artefacting. An artist, urbanist & economist, he sparked Artefacting as an initiative geared towards utilizing art, collaboration and positivity as means of building community and engaging the pressing social and cultural issues of local communities. With courage, multiculturalism and global insight in hand, Alex is passionate about bringing diverse audiences together. Through Artefacting he conducts artistic interventions from the inside of a community out to spawn fresh perspective and boost social cohesion.
With a background in writing, publicity and event planning, Alisha has always been eager to share her passions with the world. She's climbed the ladder of numerous start-ups including music companies, non-profits, and tech spaces sparing no one on her way to the top. She can usually be found with a cup of coffee plugging away on her Macbook researching the latest Internet musings and headlines. Today she calls Crown Heights home and dreams of one day owning a brownstone.
Angela is a sculptor and painter. Her work has been included in the collections of the SFMoMA Artist’s Gallery in San Francisco and The Hungarian Multi-Cultural Center in Csopak, Hungary. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen in NYC, Katonah Museum in Katonah, NY and Kolok Gallery in North Adams, MA. Angela received her MFA from Parsons School For Design and her BFA in painting from Syracuse University.
Allison Wolfe, an identical Scorpio twin and Tennessee native by way of Olympia and Washington D.C., is best known for her early role in the Riot Grrrl revolution of the 1990s, the zine Girl Germs, and singing for the influential band, Bratmobile. Allison has also performed with Cold Cold Hearts, Deep Lust, Hawnay Troof, and Partyline, and helped start the Ladyfest movement.
Beth Fertig is a New York City native and WNYC’s education reporter who also covers city affairs. She’s been on staff with the station since 1995, and previously covered City Hall during the Giuliani administration, and the U.S. Senate campaigns of Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton. She also covered transportation and infrastructure. Beth covered education all along, but as the station’s news department grew bigger she was able to spend more time examining the city’s public schools and the reforms of the Bloomberg administration.
Cait is a burgeoning author, a part-time poet, a one-time publicist, and a wandering fool. She prefers autumn, the Manhattan Bridge, frames of reference, real dark chocolate, national parks, and an expanse of sky.
Chhunny is Cambodian-Chinese-American, born in Long Beach, California and formerly a resident of New York City. She is now a Dallas City Attorney.
dan carlson was born in providence, ri in 1981. his work has been shown across the country in private galleries, contemporary art fairs, and alternative art spaces including: PULSE, VERGE, the kitchen, artists space, gallery 151, grace cathedral, and AT1 projects. he graduated from the mfa fine arts program at parsons the new school for design in 2010 and recently completed two residencies at i-park and the wassaic project. he is currently working on curating a show anchored around the contemporary american landscape.
David is a co-founder of Novel-T, a literary clothing line that offers book lovers a way to “wear your read.” Formerly, he was an editor and publicist in literary publishing and later worked in publicity at WNYC Radio, the nation's largest public radio station. He lives in Brooklyn in the Columbia Street Waterfront District--or NoReHo, as he prefers to call it.
Deanna Fei is the author of the novel A Thread of Sky (Penguin Press, 2010), a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an Indie Next Notable Book. She was born in Flushing, New York, and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. A resident of Prospect Heights, she teaches in public schools and blogs at the Huffington Post.
Southern born from snark pedigree Douglas Calhoun graduated from Rutgers University in 2006 and has lived and breathed this borough ever since. Along the way he’s contributed to Overflow Magazine, I’m From Driftwood, and created and co-hosted parties at venues all over the borough, including Queerespondence First Saturdays at Bar 4 and later Southpaw. His work as a Queerespondent means creating original material, the weekly calendar and features about queer residents. A Jack-of-all trades he has worked at Southpaw, co-hosted Baby Disco and has booked everything from punk shows at Public Assembly to Jazz at Park Slope’s Tea Lounge, assuring his place as one of the many humble princes of Kings County.
Editha is a writer and artist.
Eric Davidson is a founding member of the band New Bomb Turks. In 2010, Eric wrote We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001, a paperback chronicling the underground punk movement between 1988 and 2001.
David Goodwillie is the author of the acclaimed novel American Subversive, and the memoir Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, for which he was named one of the “Best New Writers of 2006” by members of the PEN American Center. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and websites, including New York, Men’s Health, Black Book, the New York Times, the New York Post, The New York Observer, The Rumpus and Deadspin. He has also played professional baseball, worked as a private investigator, and been an expert at Sotheby’s. A graduate of Kenyon College, he lives and works in New York City.
Besides being a native of this fair city, Heather Kristin is a memoirist, novelist, playwright, violinist, composer, ex-actress, former subway performer and mom. She graduated from the New School and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Heather has written about spending most of her twenties as the Kristin Davis stand-in on SEX AND THE CITY, youth culture in Russia, and home-schooling for various publications including Glamour, Slate, St. Petersburg Times, Narrative, Smith, New York Press, and West Side Spirit. Heather is writing a memoir about growing up in New York City.
Jacob has been bringing together sound and image for the past 7 years. He has shot album covers for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Antibalas, Dave “Baby” Cortez, and Laura Cantrell, and has been published in magazines and newspapers around the world. In 2009, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music mounted a solo exhibition of Jacob’s work, “Still Life in Soul: Contemporary Music Photography of Jacob Blickenstaff.” Jacob’s eye and heart are turned towards a still under-appreciated, yet rich and varied musical tradition and to those still living and creating irreducibly unique and moving music. Personal projects have taken him through New Orleans, Chicago, Memphis, Nashville and Detroit, seeking the authentic originators and practitioners of a disappearing art.
Jason is a touring musician, sometimes writer, label manager and former pirate radio personality, but mostly, he just wants to be Charlie Rose. Born and raised outside Chicago, where he started his more respectable take home career in academic publishing, he brings to Brooklyn The Borough a few opinions and the passwords to finally prove it. He's currently working on a collection of tour essays inspired by the time his former bandmate evaded incident in Prague by breaking a bottle and yelling "Wu Taaang!"
I’m a Pittsburgh native, and I moved to New York City to pursue my love of writing. Currently, I’m a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and the Associate Editor at Curbed NY. I received my Master’s from the City University New York Graduate School of Journalism, and I hold Bachelor of Arts degrees in English writing and art history from the University of Pittsburgh. I was the Managing Editor of InhabitatNYC, and I’ve written for Pittsburgh City Paper, The Original magazine, the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York City News Service, and Brooklyn the Borough. I love farmers markets, public art, cooking, and magazines, and I can never, ever refuse pizza.
The Adventures of the Oblivious Manhattanite in the Other Borough are true accounts of spontaneous excursions by a natural explorer distantly descended from a Montauk princess and an infamous Dutch family that helped settle New York. Here, in the vein of Diedrich Knickerbocker, J.K. Van Tassell shares her feral tales in The Brooklyn. Some names of Kings County's charming burgs and establishments are misnamed because she is dyslexic and oblivious. In her expeditions she is always accompanied by Sophie Dulac, another oblivious character from France, and the sometimes present and much needed Frampton, their Brooklyn Sherpa. The Oblivious Manhattanite lives near City Hall and very rarely goes above Canal Street. Her view from this humble abode is of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges which beckon her constantly, along with a chorus of hyped up articles that appear in New York Magazine and the New York Times about rejuvenated places like Blowanus and Yellow-Blue Hook.
Jon is a drummer living in Bushwick, with a long history opening for bands you probably know. He works at Other Music, Matador Direct and formally Sonic Boom in Seattle. People fly him places to appraise their record collections and we think that rules.
Journalist by day, writer when all else fails. I write and take pictures of things that inspire me. I'm a first-generation Filipino-American who went from the Philippines to New York to Virginia and back. At 25, I returned to New York to give journalism one last try before committing myself to a nunnery, or, you know, finding something that made money. After sufficiently flailing about, I found a reporting job writing about Google things, music rights things and invention things for an intellectual property law magazine.
Kat's background runs the creative gamut: Art Buyer, Photo Editor at the New York Observer, digital archivist for a celebrity chef public relations agency, painting and drawing teacher, designer of kitsch greeting cards, to implementing the first online image archive for the Smithsonian's Inventory of American Sculpture, in conjunction with Heritage Preservation's program, Save Outdoor Sculpture. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting as well as a Master of Science in Art History from Pratt Institute, and has exhibited her work both domestically and internationally.
Kate is a writer based in Brooklyn.
Lauren Raheja graduated from Reed College in Portland, OR in 2009 with a degree in Anthropology. Since then, she has been writing art reviews and articles about urban gardening and gentrification for Brooklyn the Borough and City Limits. She also interned on an organic farm in her native Minnesota in July of 2010, and continues to look for opportunities to cultivate her gardening skills in New York.
Matt T. Harvey is an award-winning New York City-based journalist who frequently contributed to the New York Press. He has written for the New York Observer, the New York Post, and Exiled.com. As well as covering nightlife and the arts, he often focuses on people on the margins of society. He was the first reporter to uncover that the true identity of Poster Boy was Henry Matyjewicz when he interviewed Matyjewicz for the New York Press. In 2010, he appeared on Channel 13's program Metrofocus[4] to discuss one of his NY Press cover features, "Smacktime." He was called a former "Internet microcelebrity" by Gawker's Sheila McClear in 2008. She later went on to focus on him as one of the subjects of her memoir, Last of the Live Nude Girls.
Matthue Roth is the author, most recently, of Losers, a geek-punk novel about Russian Jewish immigrant hackers, and the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go. He's also the co-creator of animated Torah video series G-dcast.com. His first screenplay, 1/20, was released in 2010. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and kids and keeps a secret diary at his website.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and ex-dominatrix. She is the author of Whip Smart (2010), a critically acclaimed memoir of her work as a professional dominatrix while she was studying at The New School. The work resulted in a front-page appearance on the cover of the New York Post, and a feature interview on NPR's radio program Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Febos also contributes to The New York Times, Salon, Bomb (magazine), Hunger Mountain, Dissent, The Southeast Review, Redivider, The Rambler, The Huffington Post, Bitch Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Natalie is a writer who has worked at Women Make Movies, the Feminist Press and Greenlight Bookstore.
Nathan Ward, who was an editor with American Heritage, has written for The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, not far from the Red Hook piers.
Rakesh Satyal is an American novelist, best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning debut novel Blue Boy. Blue Boy won the 2009 Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies and Satyal was a recipient of a 2010 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Satyal sometimes performs in New York City as a singer. He also garnered attention for his acceptance speech at the Lambda Literary Awards gala, which he sang to the tune of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."
Robin Bacior’s voice speaks of a much older soul. With well-crafted folk vignettes softly painted in waltz timing, her songs reveal honest pictures with instrumentation as a medium to illuminate her lyrics. Born and raised in California, Bacior took great influence from California folk traditions and brought them with her to New York, where she began to mend in more textured instrumentation, layering dynamic sounds into simple folk structures. In November 2011, Bacior released her debut LP, ‘Rest Our Wings’, serving as a chronicle of Bacior’s songwriting growth from California to New York. Working out the LP’s skeleton at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, Bacior took the recordings to Headgear Studios in Brooklyn, where she and Bindschedler completed the songs with engineer/drummer Nick Smeraski (Headgear Studios, Whalebelly). Other releases include Bacior’s debut EP, Aimed For Night (2009), and her first 7”, Man Before Me b/w Headless Sheep, on her own label, Consonants & Vowels Recordings (2010). The resulting music has captured the attention of New York’s folk scene with near lullaby-like compositions, lingering melodies and subtle harmonies.
Royal is a native New Yorker whose memoir is titled Fame Shark.
I am a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and plays! My work has been published with Clarkesworld Magazine, Nerve.com, The Rumpus.net, Brooklyn the Borough, and elsewhere. I mostly prefer my SF in print form and a little bit pulpy! I have too many favorite writers to list here. Contact me and I'll tell you.
Sam has worked at the Lambent Foundation, the Center for HIV Educational Studies and Training, Bedstuy Campaign Against Hunger and the Willie Brown Academy Garden Program and lives in Brooklyn.
I am Shaina Feinberg. I grew up in New York City and I love Joan of Arc. I am a writer, editor, producer, director, lover-of-life, hypercrafter, dog owner, friend, child, sister, aunt, omnivore, performer, laugher, collaborator, peacenik, goofball.
Shelly was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Shelly’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Quarterly West, cream city review, and fivechapters among other places. She curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village, teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers' Workshop, and is the co-producer of Literary Death Match Tel Aviv. Shelly was awarded the 2008 Indiana Review Fiction Prize for her story “New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,” and is currently completing her first story collection, which carries the same title. She is represented by Janklow & Nesbit Associates in New York.
Susannah is a writer and native Brooklynite.
Born in San Francisco, Suzanne received her BA from UC Santa Cruz in 2004 and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2009. She has lived in Brooklyn since 2007 where she writes, makes sculpture and installation work, and hosts the occasional feminist tea party.
Born and bred in Washington Heights, notoriously a hotbed for hip hop, taeOne first dabbled in the scene as a graff writer, roaming the streets and subway tunnels of New York’s underground. After getting popped by the cops for vandalism, he got his hands on a Akai s20 sampler and decided to use his creative energy in a more legal fashion as a Hip Hop producer. taeOne curates a sound that expands on the spirit of 90s hip hop. Naming the Beatminerz, Organized Noise, and Jay Dee as influences, no sound or tempo is off limits. taeOne’s versatility means his beats are at home in the seediest strip clubs and the finest upscale lounges. taeOne’s visual work focuses on the most fundamental and honest aspect of graffiti / street art, the tag. Using whatever supplies he can get his hands on, taeOne captures the often unappreciated and surreal beauty of urban decay.
Teale is an actress, writer, and aspiring filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn.
“I think a lot,” laughed the artist Itziar Barrio, stationed at the desk in her fifth floor studio at CSV (Clemente Soto Velez) on Suffolk Street in Manhattan. “That’s my job!” We were discussing her past eight years working as a full time artist – six of them in New York …
