New Book Round Up at Bar Redux

Kayla Min Andrews is a biracial Korean American writer who lives in New Orleans. Her work has been published in Lit Hub, The Massachusetts Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere. Her flash essay “Old Kleenex” was nominated for a Best of the Net in 2020. She was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival’s Very Short Fiction Contest in 2023. Kayla assisted Putnam with the posthumous publication of her mother Katherine Min’s novel The Fetishist (January 2024), including editing the manuscript, writing the afterword, and promoting the novel. The Fetishist’s unique publication journey was profiled in The Washington Post, The LA Times, and elsewhere. Kayla is an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph and is working on a novel.

Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa in 1986. She was raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University and a doctorate in the same discipline from the University of Oxford. The author of Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years, a study of Stein’s later experimental gestures and their philosophical implications within Hitler’s Europe, she is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Todd Cirillo was born of bastard lineage. He has many books and misdemeanors. His sixth and most recent collection is Disposable Darlings (Roadside Press). He is editor and co-founder of Six Ft. Swells Press. He is perversely attracted to places of piracy, depravity and weirdness. Todd lives in New Orleans, where he seeks out shiny moments and strange wisdom while looking pretty. He can be found at www.toddcirillo.com

Michael Allen Zell is a New Orleans-based novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and playwright. He is an honoree of both The Times-Picayune Top 10 Book of the Year and Top 10 Play of the Year. Zell’s most recent novel is The Last Shadow. He is best known for his crime fiction series featuring Bobby Delery, a Tulane University Criminology professor, who is forced to right wrongs on the streets of New Orleans. The L.A. Review of Books praised, “Zell demonstrates a gallows humor and a fine ear for entertainment…like the best crime fiction, the story invests deeply in setting, and it succeeds by virtue of its author’s palpable love for New Orleans and the people who live there.” Susan Larson in The Times-Picayune said, “What really keeps us turning pages is Zell’s authorial voice, his insights into human nature, and the dark sense of humor that comes out of observing city life.”

M.A. Nicholson is a New Orleans poet, editor, educator, journalist, and co-founder of LMNL Arts. An alumna of Loyola University and a M.F.A. graduate from the University of New Orleans—where she served as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine—M.A. was the recipient of the 2021 Andrea-Saunders Gereighty Academy of American Poets Award and has work featured in Best New Poets 2022. Her debut poetry collection Around the Gate (Word Works Books, 2024) was selected by judge Carolyne Wright for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection prize.