To welcome our summer MFA residents, we're giving them our June KGB reading, which will also serve as our first MFA mixer. 

Kiley Bense is an MFA student in nonfiction at Columbia University. Her essays have appeared online for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Saveur, and Narratively. In 2017, she was the inaugural winner of the Irene Adler Prize, a scholarship for women writers. Follow her on Twitter at @kileybense.

Jiordan Castle is a writer living in New York City with a pug named Hacksaw. She is a regular contributor to the LA-based quarterly Compound Butter. Her work has appeared in Bitterzoet Magazine, Palaver, Potluck Mag, Brain Mill Press, Tell Us a Story, Verdad, and elsewhere. She will graduate with an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College in 2019.

Tanya Everett hails from Mass, bred in Brooklyn, to pursue her career as an actor and writer. She is an MFA candidate in Playwriting at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been performed in many Off and Off-off Broadway venues, including Cherry Lane, HERE Arts Center, TheaterLab, Kraine, Cherry Pit. Her play "A Slow Boil: Parts 1, 2,3" was recently performed as part of the 8th Season of the Fire This Time Festival. She was chosen for the 2016-17 Wright Club, a playwright development wing of the critically acclaimed, Amoralists. Other plays include: T(w)o Train: To Be In Transit(ion), We Were Never Meant To Survive, Doesn't Matter How You Say It, Got A Light, Lady of the Lake, and Virgin Christmas. She has written everal screenplays and produced her short, Without Scars, which you can find on Amazon.

Originally from Chicago, Katie Rejsek is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University. She has been previously published in Iowa's Best Emerging Poets anthology and Hooligan magazine. She is Web Editor for Washington Square Review, and lives in Brooklyn.  

Alisson Wood’s essays, stories, and poems have appeared in places including The New York Times and Catapult. Currently, she's a candidate for an MFA in Fiction at NYU where she's Managing Editor of the literary magazine Washington Square Review. She is also a professor of creative writing for undergraduates at NYU. She is the founder and curator of the Pigeon Pages NYC reading series and serves as editor for the Pigeon Pages Journal. She is at work on a memoir. You can find her online at alissonwood.com.