Columbia Selects at the KGB Bar! We are delighted to announce the return of Columbia Selects—our storied alumni reading series—to the KGB Bar for the 2025-26 season!
Join us Thursday, April 2, 7 PM, for another stellar lineup:
Rose DeMaris '23 is a writer currently based in Montana. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University ('23), where she was awarded a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in the New England Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, poets.org, and elsewhere. Nominated for the Best New Poets anthology and Best of the Net, her poems have received an Orison Books’ Best Spiritual Literature Award and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. Rose also writes fiction and nonfiction, and in addition to a full-length collection of poems she is polishing two prose projects.
Robert Rubsam '22 writes fiction and nonfiction. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Poetry, New York Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, Liberties Journal, the Paris Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, among other places. He is a contributing writer at Commonweal Magazine, and he hosts the Interval Reading Series here at KGB Bar.
Meredith Aristone '24 holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and a BFA in creative writing from Pratt Institute. She teaches writing at Atlantic County College and Delaware Valley University. Meredith is the author of Excessive Sodium: A Collection of Poems For The Troubled Soul, the writer-director of the indie short Psych-Idyllic (2015), and the 2024 winner of the NYC Poetry Contest. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in NYC Poetry Magazine, Wax Poetry and Art Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Fjords Review, Pink Disco Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Defunkt Mag, Go Magazine, and Girlz, Interrupted: An Anti-Lifestyle Blog for Crazy B*tches. She is currently working on her memoir Girlhood Is The Monster Under My Bed: A Story of Femininity & Vice, and is passionate about finding the magic in the mundane, investigating liminal spaces, and romanticizing her life.
What is Columbia Selects? Columbia Selects is an alumni reading series hosted by the Columbia MFA Writing Program. In recent years, many of our featured writers have achieved critical and commercial success. This is your chance to glimpse who you'll be reading in 2027!
Columbia Selects ([email protected]) is curated by Bryan VanDyke '00 and Emily Austin '10.
Come for the talent. Stay for the camaraderie and cocktails.