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, May 7, at 7 PM, for another stellar lineup:
Rona Figueroa '22 is a writer, songwriter and Broadway actress/singer. She received an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in 2022 where she was awarded a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. Figueroa has been chipping away at her first novel, Rage, Goddess, about the friendship between two musical theater actresses—different in every way but their Filipino heritage—who ultimately end up in the same Broadway show, one understudying the other. Part portrait of an artist, part insider’s guide to backstage life, Rage, Goddess meditates on the tension between inspiration and competition, art and ephemerality, authenticity and kindness.
Abby Melick '24 is a New York-based writer and translator. She received a BA in English from Princeton and an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University, where she's currently a Lecturer-in-Discipline in the University Writing program. She’s been an artist-in-residence at Catwalk Institute, and has participated in both the Sewanee Writers’ and Bread Loaf Translators’ Conferences. Her work has been published in The Yale Review, Fractured Lit, Brink Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Plentitudes, and Jabberwock Review (Pushcart Nomination). She was shortlisted for The Masters Review’s Best Emerging Writers of 2025 and won the 2025 Gulf Coast Translation Prize. She is currently working on a novel about method acting.
Miles Strucker '15 is a fiction writer and educator whose work explores the relationship between nature and the imagination. As an MFA student at Columbia, he received the Felipe P. De Alba Award and an Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship. In 2024, he was Honorable Mention for the Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship. Currently, he teaches a course at Bard College called Language & Thinking, and a course at Parsons School of Design called Constructed Environments, often letting ideas mingle between the two. He just completed a novel.
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.
