october 28 • 8PM

THE URBANE ARTS CLUB

Andrew Colarusso is the author most recently of "Pettyg-d: Poems" and "Black Body Index". He is the owner of Taylor & Co. Books. 

Margaret Kogan, a Brooklyn native and Windsor Terrace resident, has been writing poetry since she was 10. Her third book, Steppingstones, was published on September 9. Like her first two books, Motherland and No Witnesses, Steppingstones is available on amazon.com. Unlike her first two books, Steppingstones is composed almost entirely of Japanese short forms-- haiku and tankas--arising out of Margaret’s Buddhist practice. Her fourth book, True Confessions, will be published early in 2027. You can read more about Margaret on her website, margaretkogan.com

Maxim Matusevich is an author, historian, and Professor of History at Seton Hall University, where he chairs the History Department. Born and raised in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, he immigrated to the United States in 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. His scholarship on the Cold War, international relations, and African-Soviet encounters has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, and Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. Maxim is also a fiction writer whose stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and other literary journals. His debut fiction collection, Six Trains of No Return (Academic Studies Press, 2026), explores migration, memory, displacement, and human connection across the shifting landscapes of the late Soviet and post–Cold War worlds.

Kailee Pedersen writes haunted, unsettling speculative fiction. She graduated with a BA in classics from Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek. Kailee was adopted from Nanning, China and grew up in Nebraska, where her family owns a farm. She is the author of the queer poetry chapbook Pastorale and the novel Sacrificial Animals, which was named one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2024 and a finalist for Best Horror at the 2025 Libby Book Awards. When not scribbling down her next book, you can catch her studying opera performance at the Mozarteum University, playing video games, or working as a software engineer in New York City. The Minimalist is her second novel. 

Doors open at 7:30, show starts at 8. RSVP here.