meet our instructors

instructor bios

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Matthew Salesses

Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.

Shuchi Saraswat

Shuchi Saraswat received her MFA from Emerson College, where she primarily worked on a novel. She is the recipient of The 2012 Gulliver Travel Research Grant from The Speculative Literature Foundation and has received fellowships to Writers Omi at Ledig House and The Writers' Room of Boston and scholarships to Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. While at Emerson, Shuchi served as the nonfiction editor and then the fiction editor at Fringe Magazine, and worked as an editorial assistant in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's adult trade division. She currently helps manage the fiction section and hosts author readings at Brookline Booksmith.

Justine Schofield

Justine Schofield is the communications coordinator of Pubslush, a global, crowdsourcing publishing platform for authors to raise funds and gauge the initial audience for new book ideas. Pubslush also operates an independent imprint that acquires books from the platform, and for every book sold, donates a children’s book to a child in need. Justine is currently enrolled at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, earning her MFA in Creative Writing. She graduated from Emerson College in Boston, MA with a degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She specializes in social media and public relations and has held various freelance editing and writing jobs, and her work has been published in many online and print publications.

Katrin Schumann

Katrin Schumann is the co-author of The Secret Power of Middle Children and Mothers Need Time-Outs, Too. She has been featured on the TODAY show, Talk of the Nation and in The Times, as well as other newspapers, magazines and radio, nationally and internationally. Schumann’s latest projects include a historical novel set in the Baltic, various non-fiction books in development, and on-going editorial work for editors, agents and writers. For the past ten years she has been teaching fiction and non-fiction, most recently at a local women’s prison, and running parenting focus groups and surveys. Before going freelance, she helped produce talk shows at NPR, where she won the Kogan Media Award. Schumann has been granted writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony. Awarded scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities, she studied literature, language and journalism. Schumann was born in Freiburg, Germany, grew up in New York City and London, and now lives in Massachusetts.

Beth Schwartzapfel

Beth Schwartzapfel is a journalist and writer specializing in long-form and narrative journalism. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, the New York Times, the Nation, and Ms. She covers a wide range of subjects, but has a specific interest in the criminal justice system, prisons and jails, and health care for the underserved and disenfranchised, particularly substance use, addiction, and HIV/AIDS. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. Beth earned a BA in English, with honors in Creative Writing, from Brown University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School. Beth has worked as a reporter at the Forward and as a fact checker at Esquire and StoryCorps. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as an outreach worker and educator at an HIV/hepatitis C clinic. She lived in Providence, RI, and then Brooklyn, NY, before moving recently to Boston. Read her work at www.blackapple.org.

Michelle Seaton

Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Jacqueline Sheehan

Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, roofing, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers. Her first novel, Truth, was published in 2003 by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost and Found, was published in 2007 by Avon, Harper Collins. Lost and Found is already in its 6th printing. She has published travel articles (Winter in Soviet Georgia), short stories (most recently in the Berkshire Review), and numerous essays and radio pieces. In 2005, she was the editor of the anthology Women Writing in Prison. This anthology is the culmination of eight years of writing workshops sponsored by Voices From Inside, an advocacy group for incarcerated women. She is currently the fiction editor for Patchwork Journal, an online journal sponsored by Patchwork Farm, and she is part of the faculty at Writers in Progress in Florence, MA. She maintains a small psychology practice in Western Massachusetts. Jacqueline teaches workshops on writing and the combination of yoga and writing.

Clara Silverstein

Clara Silverstein is the author of the memoir White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation (University of Georgia Press), and three cookbooks, most recently A White House Garden Cookbook, a chronicle with recipes of the first year of Michelle Obama's vegetable garden. A former food writer and editor at the Boston Herald, Silverstein's articles have also been published in Health magazine, Prevention, Runner's World, the Boston Globe, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She directs the summer Chautauqua Writers' Center, and has led writing workshops at Grub Street, Boston University, and Emerson College. She recently completed an M.A. in History.

Deborah Sosin

Deborah Sosin is a nonfiction writer, freelance editor, and clinical social worker. She is currently enrolled in Lesley University's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Since 2009, she has offered Write It Like It Is workshops in the Boston area, teaching the technique of freewriting to get started and keep going. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Globe Magazine, Zone 3, The Review Review, Journal News, and on Skirt.com and Salon.com. Her essay, "Moon Fever: An Apollo 11 Flashback," which was featured on Salon.com, was selected for inclusion in the textbook Perspectives on Modern World History: The Apollo 11 Moon Landing (Greenhaven Press, 2011). Debbie has taught classes at the Arlington Center and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She has a private psychotherapy practice in Newton and consults to writers and writing groups. Learn more at www.deborahsosin.com.

Suzette Martinez Standring

Suzette Martinez Standring is a nationally syndicated columnist and blogger (Suzette’s Spiritual Café) with GateHouse Media. She is the award-winning author of The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry, Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, which is used in university journalism courses. She hosts It’s All Write With Suzette, a local TV show about writing, and produced Suzette Standring: A Writer’s Meditation CD, which uses guided imagery exercises to enhance writing creativity. Suzette is a past president of The National Society of Newspaper Columnists. She presents writing workshops nationally. Email her: suzmar@comcast.net or visit www.readsuzette.com.

Adam Stumacher

Adam Stumacher's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Night Train, Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, was anthologized in Best New American Voices, and won the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. He holds degrees from Cornell University and Saint Mary's College and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He has been awarded a tuition scholarship from Bread Loaf and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Spiro Arts, and others. He has taught creative writing at MIT, the University of Wisconsin, Saint Mary's College, and Grub Street, and has many years experience as an educator in urban high schools. He is the author of a short story collection, The Neon Desert, and is currently working on a novel, entitled A Liar's Opus.

Grace Talusan

Grace Talusan lives in Somerville and teaches writing at Tufts University. She has published essays and stories in Creative Nonfiction, The Boston Globe, Brevity, Buran, Tufts Magazine, Colorlines, and other publications. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a Massachusetts Artist Grant in Fiction.

Allana Taranto

Allana Taranto is a professional photographer and owner of Ars Magna Studio in Boston.

Cam Terwilliger

Cam Terwilliger's stories have appeared in many magazines, including The Mid-American Review, Post Road, West Branch, and Narrative, where he was selected as one of the magazine's "15 Under 30." His fiction has also been supported by a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society. A graduate of Emerson College's MFA, he now teaches at Louisiana State University.

Holly Thompson

Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com) is the author of two young adult novels in verse: The Language Inside and Orchards, winner of the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, both published by Delacorte/Random House. She is also author of the adult novel Ash and the picture book The Wakame Gatherers. Raised in Massachusetts but a longtime resident of Japan, she recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. A graduate of the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program, she writes poetry and fiction for children, teens and adults, serves as regional advisor for the Japan chapter of SCBWI, and teaches creative writing and literature at Yokohama City University.

Becky Tuch

Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.

Jodie Vinson

Jodie received her MFA in non-fiction creative writing from Emerson College, where she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship, an Ethics in Communication Scholarship, and a Non-Fiction Creative Writing Award. During her program at Emerson, Jodie developed a book about her travels to literary sites around the world, which was nominated for best thesis. Jodie currently manages the travel book and map department at Brookline Booksmith, and writes for and edits globecorner.com.

Amanda Eyre Ward

Amanda Eyre Ward is the author of the novels Sleep Toward Heaven and How to Be Lost. She has been published in Tin House, Zoetrope, StoryQuarterly, and on Salon.com. She lives in Austin, TX with her family. Please visit her at www.amandaward.com.

Annie Weatherwax

Annie Weatherwax's novel, How It Ends will be published by Scribner in the summer of 2014. Her short stories have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Southern Review, Other Voices, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She was the 2009 winner of the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction. Her writing on language and art has appeared in The New York Times in a review of The Graphic Canon. She is a painter and sculptor and for years earned a living sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Pixar and others. www.annieweatherwax.com.

Ted Weesner

Ted Weesner, Jr. is a writer based in Somerville, whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Glamour, Gastronomica, The Cincinnati Review, Memorious and on National Public Radio.  His story "Tuscaloosa,” featured in Ploughshares’ Emerging Writers issue, was a Best American Short Stories Notable selection.  His play, The King Size, was a finalist in the 2009 Prague Playwriting Contest.  He has been the recipient of a PEN/New England Discovery Award, grants from the St. Botolph Club and Somerville Arts Council, and a residency at the MacDowell Colony.  His critical essays about The Catcher in the Rye are included in Scribner’s American Writer and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature.  He teaches creative writing at Tufts and The Museum School, and has just completed a novel about expatriates living in 1990s’ Prague.

Linda K. Wertheimer

Linda K. Wertheimer, the Boston Globe’s former education editor, spent 23 years working full-time as a journalist before deciding to pursue her dream – isn’t it everybody’s? – of writing a book. She has published op-eds, investigative news stories, narrative series, travel articles, features and personal essays. Her articles have appeared in many publications, including the Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune, and The Writer magazine. She is writing a memoir about her journey from grief to faith after her brother died in a car accident. An excerpt from her book recently placed third in Moment magazine’s memoir contest and won an honorable mention in Tiferet journal’s nonfiction writing contest. She now teaches journalism at Boston University. She received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. To see her blog and other writings, visit lindakwertheimer.com. Follow her on Twitter @lindakwert.

Sue Williams

Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.

Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters is the author, most recently, of The Last Policeman, which was selected as an Amazon “Best Book” of July 2012 and for the Indy NEXT List of the American Bookseller’s Association. His other works of fiction include the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of 2011. Winters’ other books include the science-fiction Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the Missing Everything, and the supernatural thriller Bedbugs, which has been optioned for the screen by Warner Brothers.

Joanne Wyckoff

Joanne Wyckoff is an agent with the Carol Mann Agency. Prior to joining CMA, she was an agent with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Before becoming an agent, Joanne worked as Senior Editor at Ballantine Books/Random House, and as Executive Editor at Beacon Press. As an agent, Joanne represents nonfiction and selected fiction. She has a particular love of the memoir and narrative nonfiction and is always looking for exciting new writing in these genres. She has a lot of experience working with academics and experts in diverse fields, helping them develop and write books for a broad market. Her nonfiction list includes books in psychology, women’s issues, education, health and wellness, self-help, natural history and anything about animals, religion and spirituality, and African-American issues.

Amy Yelin

Amy Yelin has published essays and memoir in the Boston Globe, Globe Magazine, the Gettysburg Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her essay “The Memoirist” (LunchTicket.com) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and “Torn” (The Baltimore Review), was recognized as a notable essay of 2006 in the Best American Essays 2007. She also has essays in the anthologies Mamas and Papas and Tarnished: True Tales of Innocence Lost. In 2008, she won the Skirt magazine and WEKU (an NPR station) “This We Believe” contest and recorded her piece “On Magic” for a radio special. Recently she was awarded a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship from The Vermont Studio Center, and has received scholarships from the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony and the Prague Summer Writing Program. Amy completed her MFA in creative writing at Lesley University in 2005 and she has been mentoring students in the program ever since. Her website is www.yelinwords.com.