City Artist Corps & KGB Bar Presents: Pandemic Drafts | A Literary Reading

This reading will feature a mix of poetry and prose and will be an opportunity to reconnect with literature and fellow humans. Seven New York City writers will showcase work they've produced during the COVID quarantine. Literature at its best is about connecting with people through the power of language and storytelling, so let's do that.

Host: Malcolm Hansen

Malcolm Hansen's debut novel, They Come in All Colors, received the 2019 First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was nominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. He is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow Finalist in Fiction and part of the New York City Artist Corps.​

Featured Readers:

Alexandra Watson

Alex Watson is a fiction writer and poet from Syracuse, NY. She writes about mixed race identity, mental illness, and addiction. She’s the executive editor of Apogee Journal, a publication providing a platform for historically underrepresented artists and writers. For her work with Apogee she received the 2019 PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing. She’s a Lecturer at Barnard College.

Eric Roy

Eric Roy is the author of a chapbook, All Small Planes (Lily Poetry, 2021) whose hybrid writing concerns the ongoing opioid crisis. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming from Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and the Tusculum Review, and his work has appeared in Bennington Review, Ruminate Magazine, Salamander, Salt Hill, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.

​Belal Rafiq

Belal Rafiq grew up in the D.C. Metro Area. He received his MFA from Columbia University, where he was a Fiction Fellow. He was an Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction, and his stories have been published in The Iowa Review, The Masters Review, among other publications. He currently lives in Brooklyn, and is at work on a novel and collection of stories.

Forsyth Harmon

Forsyth Harmon is the author and illustrator of Justine. She is also the illustrator of national bestseller Girlhood by Melissa Febos and The Art of the Affair by Catherine Lacey. Forsyth’s work has been featured in Granta, BOMB, Refinery29, The Believer, and more. She received both a BA and an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in New York.

Sanaë Lemoine

Sanaë Lemoine was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA at Columbia University. Her debut novel, The Margot Affair, was published in June 2020.

Gerard Coletta

Gerard Coletta is a writer originally from Boston and currently residing in Brooklyn. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Adirondack Review, the Boston Review, the Common, B O D Y, LEVELER, THRUSH, Prelude, the Sonora Review, the White Review, and elsewhere.

For more information, please visit: https://www.malcolmhansen.com/pandemic-drafts

Note: Proof of vaccination will be required to enter all spaces in 85 East 4th Street per the Key to NYC Vaccine Mandate

Host or Publisher Malcolm Hansen