Alan Kaufman and William Taylor, Jr. join Colleen McKee to celebrate the publication of her first full-length collection of ficton, poetry and memoir, Nine Kinds of Wrong, hot off the presses from JKPublishing.

Expect tales of a beautiful world of addictive sorrows; glamorous, unwise sex; crime and cabaret; and more whiskey-soaked death than you can shake a stick at.

Colleen has been known to say that she writes poems, memoir, and fiction. That she also teaches people how to communicate about art at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. What else? That she writes most of her poems on public transportation; dreams frequently and in color; and can probably kick your ass in Scrabble. She once claimed to write every day and to try to be a nice person. Were that to fail, said she, she tried at least to be honest.  That was when she was promoting her poetry.  Now, with this, who knows?  Probably it all applies.  Tamim Ansary recommended her to us.  He says she’s the real deal.  She indeed seems to be.  Come and find out whether you can hazard a guess on that score.

Colleen McKee

Colleen McKee is the author of two previous chapbooks: My Hot Little Tomato (Cherry Pie Press, 2007); and A Partial List of Things I Have Done for Money (The Saint Louis Projects, a division of JKPublishing, 2011). Additionally, she is co-editor of an anthology of personal narratives, Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America (PenUltimate, 2008). She grew up in rural Missouri in the green, humid song of cicadas. She was a kid with chiggers in her socks, always playing with bugs. She then lived for twenty years in South Saint Louis, not far from the A-B Brewery, where the summer nights smelled like fried chicken and hops. She now lives in Oakland, CA, in a neighborhood that smells like marijuana, where the sidewalks are covered with fanged graffiti monsters whose speech bubbles say, “I love you.” By day, she teaches art. By night, she daydreams. She likes to wander the streets and go off on tangents.

Alan Kaufman‘s most recent book is Drunken Angel (just out in paperback). His novel Matches was published by Little, Brown and Company in the Fall of 2005. David Mamet has called it “an extraordinary war novel,” and Dave Eggers has written that “there is more passion here then you see in twenty other books combined.” Kaufman’s critically-acclaimed memoir, Jew Boy (Fromm/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has appeared in three editions, hardcover and paperback, in the United States and Great Britain. Kaufman is the award-winning editor of several anthologies, including The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays. He has taught in the graduate and undergraduate schools of the Academy of Art University and in writing workshops in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Salon, “The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review” and “The San Francisco Examiner.” Kaufman has been widely anthologized, most recently in” Nothing Makes You Free: Writings From Descendents of Holocaust Survivors” (WW Norton). Kaufman is a member of PEN American Center. Kaufman’s papers and manuscripts are on deposit in the Special Collections Library of the University of Delaware and he is profiled in the Europa Biographical Reference Series.

William Taylor Jr. lives in San Francisco with his wife and a cat named Trouble. His work has been widely published in the small press in such publications as Poesy, Anthills, and The New York Quarterly, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His books of poetry include So Much Is Burning (sunnyoutside, 2006), Words for Songs Never Written: New and Collected Poems (Centennial Press, 2007), and THE HUNGER SEASON (sunnyoutside, 2009) and a prose collection, AN AGE OF MONSTERS (Epic Rites Press, 2011). His latest book is Broken When We Got Here (Epic Rites, 2013).