Jonathan Franzen - The author of five novels and five works of nonfiction, most recently the essay collection The End of the End of the Earth. One of his first public readings from The Corrections, then unpublished, was at KGB Bar.

Amity Gaige - The author of four novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife.  A New York Times Notable Book, Schroder has been translated into eighteen languages, and was shortlisted for UK’s Rathbones Folio Prize in 2014.  Amity is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship.  Her shortstories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Die Welt, Harper’s Bazaar, The Yale Review, One Story, and elsewhere.  She lives near Hartford, CT, with her family, and teaches at Yale. Amity is a veteran reader at the KGB. Amity was initiated by reading at the KGB at the start of her career, she also spent many nights there in the 90s.

Jason Brown - He earned his MFA from Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer.  Jason has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches in the MFA program at theUniversity of Oregon.  He has published two books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories(Norton/Random House) and Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work(Open City/Grove Atlantic).  His stories have won several awards and appeared in Best American Short Stories,The Atlantic, Harper’s, Sewanee Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review and othermagazines and anthologies. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. His third collection of stories entitled A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, published of 2019 by Missouri Review Books, won an Independent Publisher Book Award and the Maine Book Award/Maine Literary Award. The title story appears in the 2020 Best American Short Stories.  Jason was an early writer to appear at the KGB, reading the story “She,” which is published in the 2002 KGB Reader, On the Rocks, edited by Rebecca Donner.