meet our instructors
instructor bios
A - F
- Allison Adair
Allison Adair has taught poetry workshops and literature seminars at Boston University and the University of Iowa, where she held a Writers' Workshop Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She has written for curricular guides, academic texts, and the Massachusetts Long Road to Justice exhibit, and she served on the editorial board of The Iowa Review. A joint fellowship from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design allowed her to study painting and poetry in Dublin, Galway, and Belfast, and she was a finalist in the Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition. In 2007 she participated in the National Braille Association's Twice Seen photography exhibit with "Air Show." Other original poems, as well as translations of French and Italian poets, have appeared in various publications, including Emic, The Boston Globe, and Chris Castellani's The Saint of Lost Things. Allison holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she has been a Grub Street board member since 2004.- Steve Almond
Steve Almond is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction book Candyfreak. His new book is a collection of essays, (Not That You Asked). He lives outside Boston with his wife and daughter Josephine, who can now make the noises of seven different farm animals. His on-line home is www.stevenalmond.com.- Ben Berman
Ben Berman has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He has received honors from the New England Poetry Club and is a recipient of a 2008 Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and has poems published in Salamander, The Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Connecticut Review and other journals, as well. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and high school English teacher, he now coaches Humanities teachers in the Boston Public Schools.- Jenna Blum
New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum has been a proud Grub fiction instructor for eleven years. Called "the little book that could" in a recent Publisher's Weekly article, Jenna's debut novel Those Who Save Us was published by Harcourt in 2004; in October 2007 the paperback jumped onto the Boston Globe and the New York Times bestseller lists. Educated at Kenyon College and Boston University, Jenna has published short fiction and nonfiction in numerous national periodicals, including Seventeen (where her work first appeared in 1986), The Boston Globe, The Improper Bostonian, Poets & Writers, Meridian, Faultline, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, The Bellingham Review, and The Briar Cliff Review, which twice nominated Jenna's stories for a Pushcart Prize. Currently, Jenna is working on her second novel, The Stormchasers, which will be published by Dutton, a Penguin imprint. She also travels nationally to speak about Those Who Save Us, writes the Writers' Advice Column for the Grub Free Press, and teaches grub's master novel workshop. Grub is, Jenna will happily tell anyone who will listen, the reason Jenna stays in Boston. Please visit Jenna at her website: www.jennablum.com.- Christopher Boginski
Christopher Boginski is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the University of Washington, where he taught creative writing and English as a second language and where he was a research assistant for David Shields. He lives in Boston and is in the process of finishing his first book, a memoir that explores the influence of the past upon the present in everyone from himself to Camus.- Lisa Borders
Lisa Borders' first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and was published in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, CrossConnect and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies at Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She was also a visiting writer at the University of Pennsylvania. Lisa holds an MA in Creative Writing from Temple University in Philadelphia, where she taught undergraduate writing. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.- Steve Brykman
Steve Brykman left medical school in '93 to write fart jokes as Managing Editor of National Lampoon. Since then, his work has appeared in Playboy, Cracked, Nerve, and The New Yorker, where he was featured in Talk of the Town. He has written for and/or appeared on Prairie Home Companion, Huffington Post, Comedy Central, G4TV, and the Food Network and has performed standup and improv comedy in clubs all across the country. His writing has recently been featured in Awake: a Reader for the Sleepless. As a writing fellow at UMass, Amherst, his fiction was awarded the Harvey Swados prize. He has been thrown out of both the 2000 Democratic National Convention and the Smithsonian Museum and has on more than one occasion performed standup comedy naked.- Eric Butterman
Eric Butterman is a freelance writer and teacher who has written for more than 50 publications, including Glamour and ESPN.com. His articles have allowed him to do everything from chatting with Venus Williams about her killer serve to finding out that action film director John Woo would actually love to direct a musical. His students have credited his courses with helping them sell an article for as much as $4,000 and make four-figure deals before his course was even over. Butterman concentrates on using actual pitches that sold as examples and taking you through an understanding of every step that goes into succeeding in writing--including negotiating deals and how to turn one assignment into many. He's lectured at several universities, including NYU and Harvard.- Scott Challener
Scott Challener teaches in Boston University's Writing Program and Metropolitan College, and Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies, as well as at Grub Street. He volunteers for PEN New England's Prison Writing Program and 826 Boston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, The Rumpus, Mississippi Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Fort Point Channel area of South Boston.- Chip Cheek
Chip Cheek received his MFA in 2007 from Emerson College, where he was editor-in-chief of the literary journal Redivider. His stories have appeared in Washington Square, Night Train, Quick Fiction, Minnetonka Review, Fringe, and Brevity and Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories. A story of his will also appear in the forthcoming edition of What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. Born in Georgia, raised in Texas, he currently resides in Somerville and keeps a day-job in textbook publishing. - John Cotter
John Cotter's first novel, Under the Small Lights, was published in the summer of 2010 by Miami University Press. He is a founding editor of the online arts magazine Open Letters Monthly and has published short fiction in Hanging Loose, Lifted Brow, Lost, and genre fiction in New Genre (forthcoming) and Lifted Brow. - Jennifer De Leon
Jennifer De Leon's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ms., Poets & Writers Magazine, Guernica, SOLSTICE, Kweli Journal, and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2010. She earned a B.A. in International Relations from Connecticut College, an M.A.T. from the University of San Francisco, and is completing her M.F.A. in Fiction from UMASS Boston. Jenn has received fellowships from the VONA Writing Conference with Junot DÃaz, the Macondo Writers' Workshop with Sandra Cisneros, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She teaches creative writing at UMASS Boston and is a fiction reader for Ploughshares. Currently, she is working on her first novel and editing a literary anthology on Latinas and College.- Sorche Fairbank
Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of client -- the first-time author. Her tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices and women's voices, and the mystery/suspense genre. On the nonfiction side, she is most likely to take on books that tackle current events and societal issues with a narrative treatment. She has a strong interest in women's voices and class and race issues, quality lifestyle books (food, wine, and home design), sports, memoir, humor, and pop culture. And to date, she has signed on three terrific clients through Grub Street, with more certain to follow.
Subjects and genres not of interest by Sorche and Fairbank Literary include: sci-fi and fantasy, children's and YA, self-help, romance, sports fiction, and generally anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Unless, of course, it's really really really good.
Notable authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School; Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and author of Solar Revolution; Darci Klein's To Full Term, A Mother's Triumph Over Miscarriage; Jonathan McCullough's A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism; the estate of Robin Moore (The French Connection, The Green Berets, etc.); Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker); syndicated cartoonist Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette); Edgar-winning mystery writer and host of Anatomy Of A Mystery, Rex Burns; and Robert McKinnon, founder of Yellow Brick Road and editor of the forthcoming Legacy: Today's Leaders on Tomorrow's World, a collection of essays by such luminaries as Al Gore, Paul Simon, Mia Hamm, Richard Louv, and others.
Updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals can be found at www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/SorcheFairbank
- Kate Flora
Former attorney Kate Flora is the author of ten books. Her dynamic character, Thea Kozak, returns in 2008 in Stalking Death, from Jim Huang's Crum Creek Press/The Mystery Company and The Angel of Knowlton Park, from Five Star. Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine, co-written with a career police officer, was a 2007 Edgar nominee, and she has gone in a new direction with her gritty police procedural series. Flora's stories have appeared in the Level Best anthologies, in Sisters on The Case, an anthology edited by Sara Paretsky, and in Per Se, an anthology of fiction. In 2008, she was a Derringer nominee for her short fiction. Flora's 11th book will be published in September. She has also published 8 short stories and two profiles in literary journals. She has taught writing at the Cape Cod Writers Conference, for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, The Brown Learning Community, and Grub Street.- Mark Fogarty
Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer. - Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s first book, Little Murders Everywhere, is forthcoming from the Irish press Salmon Poetry, and her second manuscript was selected by Marilyn Hacker as the winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2010 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Best New Poets 2008, and elsewhere. A graduate of Vassar and Emerson Colleges, she has received fellowships and scholarships from such places as the Virgina Center for Creative Arts, the Writers' Room of Boston, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is currently completing her PhD in creative writing and literature through an Elliston fellowship at the University of Cincinnati. She has taught at Emerson and Emmanuel Colleges and currently teaches writing to visual artists in MassArt's low residency MFA program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She also serves as editor-in-chief of the online magazine Memorious.org, which she co-founded in 2004.