Mandy Keifetz is an award-winning novelist, writer, playwright, editor, mixed media artist, and poet. A finishing school dropout, she is a tattooed woman and a martial artist. She’s a quick study, an able generalist, a loyal sidekick, an impossible know-it-all, and is visiting lecturer teaching writing in the Media Studies department at Queens College, CUNY where she is most renowned for securing her students an exclusive interview with disgraced Congressman George Santos. She has been a national jurist for the alliance for Young Writers and Artists Scholastic Achievement (Gold Key) awards since 2011.
(If this combination amuses you, you’ll probably get along with her.)
Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Brooklyn Rail, .Cent, Penthouse, Vogue, QW, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Medium, The Comics Journal, Lou-Lou, the New York Press, Our Town, Manhattan Spirit, Asphodel Gallery, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center and zines (and T- shirts) too numerous to list.
Corrido, optioned by Laura Phillips at Hanthum Films, UK, was her first novel and was favorably reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly, Japanese Esquire, Bloomsbury Review, KRWG/NPR, WFMU, WSTR, CKUT (McGill Radio) and the Austin Chronicle; selected as a best first novel out of New York by the Library Journal; and Entertainment Weekly called it “an intoxicating cocktail of sex and death.”
Her second novel, Flea Circus: A Brief Bestiary of Grief novel won the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Fiction Prize in 2010, selected by Francine Prose, and was published by New Issues. It has received starred reviews in The Library Journal and Kirkus. The novel was a finalist in the 2011 Grub Street National Book Prize and was given Honorable Mention. A third edition will be available in September 2024 from Unnamed Press.
She was a Fellow with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002 and her plays have been staged in London at the Young Vic and Theatre 503, in Cambridge at the Junction Theater and at the Judith E. Wilson Studio, in Montréal at the Théâtre Ste. Catherine, in Oslo at the Samtid Festivalen, and in New York at Where Eagles Dare Studios. She is an occasional MFA dissertation defense panelist at UMASS, Amherst, and a New York Public Library MaRLI Scholar.