Allison Adair (Board co-President) 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 for the Massachusetts Long Road to Justice exhibit project, 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 her poems, as well as translations of Jacques Prévert, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, have appeared in various print and online literary journals, including Emic and Owl Farm. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Linda Button (Board co-President) is principal and creative director at Tooth+Nail, a creative agency that helps top brands express their personality. Scan the TV listings and circle every other network--that's pretty much the client list: CNN, Food Network, HBO, and A&E, among others (although her favorite local client is the Peabody Essex Museum). Button also conducts creativity workshops, has been guest speaker at Harvard and Emerson Universities as well as internationally, and had her brainstorming process featured in Fast Company. Linda majored in studio art at Dartmouth College. She has two addictions: Writing and Taekwon Do.  Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. 

Ken Cohen is a partner in the Litigation Department at Goodwin Procter, where his primary areas of specialty are products liability litigation and complex civil litigation. Mr. Cohen has particular experience in products liability class action issues, including “limited issue” class questions, class definition issues, constitutional limitations on class certification and medical monitoring issues. Mr. Cohen has handled products liability litigation, especially involving prescription pharmaceutical drugs, for over 20 years. His work has included national counsel positions and arguments on behalf of large groups of defendants in mass tort situations. Mr. Cohen is a former associate professor at Boston University School of Law, where he taught, among other courses, Federal Courts and courses dealing with class actions.

Nathan Hagen is the President of Secondary Marketing Resources, a company that provides expertise to financial institutions that allow them to effectively participate in the secondary market. During his 20-year career, Nathan has been involved with a number of start-up companies, and has held influential senior management positions including President of Main Street Mortgage, President of CUMEX Mortgage and Chief Financial Officer of Members Mortgage. He is the Past Chair of the Massachusetts Mortgage Bankers Association, and was the president of the American Association of Mortgage Underwriters. He has served as a member of Fannie Mae’s Credit Union Advisory Council, and is a frequent lecturer on the subject of secondary marketing. Nathan graduated from Harvard College in 1981.

Marc Foster a Business Technology Consultant, brings 17 years of high-technology business experience to grub street's board. He has been the CEO of Reify Corporation, a biotech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to forming Reify in 2002, Marc spent six years as a venture consultant, as President of Foster & Roberts, Inc. During that time Marc co-founded and advised numerous successful companies in computing, including NETBot, InTouch Systems, Apropos and Quarry Technologies. Prior to forming Foster & Roberts, Marc spent ten years in the computer industry, at Digital Equipment Corporation, Data Translation, and Natural Language, Inc. Marc is an active fiction writer. He holds an MBA in Finance from University of Chicago.

Hillary Hedges Rayport specializes in helping early-stage companies with strategy, business planning, and business development. Most recently, Hillary was Vice President of Cytel Software, a Cambridge, MA-based company serving the pharmaceutical industry. While at Cytel, Hillary developed and implemented a new business focus and strategy, sold the company’s largest revenue accounts to date with top-ten pharmaceutical companies, and sourced an initial round of venture investment from Merck Capital Ventures. Hillary began her career over a decade ago at Geocapital Partners, a venture capital firm, where she was responsible for identifying and developing investment opportunities in early stage technology companies. After earning her MBA from Harvard Business School, Hillary served as a Principal at Arts Alliance, a UK-based venture capital firm investing in early stage new media companies. Posted in London and New York, Hillary managed investments for Arts Alliance, serving on the boards of several portfolio companies. Hillary has a BA in English Literature from Princeton University. Hillary’s favorite novel is Moby Dick, which she has read five times and which was the subject of her undergraduate thesis.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories (Random House, 2004). Named a Best Book of the Year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, the collection has received the Southern Review's Annual Short Fiction Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, the James Michener Fellowship, and was shortlisted for Ireland's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, "the richest short story prize in the world." His work appears in magazines such as The Paris Review, Oxford American, and Tin House, and in numerous anthologies including New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2003, 2004, and 2005. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under 35. Currently, he is Director of Creative Writing at Harvard. For more information, visit www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.

Michelle Toth is the director of learning and development at D.E. Shaw group in NYC. She directs all coaching, training, and professional development for the firm. She rarely writes anything except emails.

Lara JK Wilson’s short fiction has been published in the The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, American Fiction, Indiana Review, Confrontation, and the Chicago Tribune Book Section, among others. Her work was selected as first runner-up for the 2007 Nelson Algren Awards and the 2002 Mark Twain Award for Fiction. She was a fiction scholar at both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and for six years has taught fiction workshops and/or provided manuscript consulting services for Grub Street. Prior to writing fiction full-time, she worked as a freelance editor for management re-engineering and high-tech manufacturing firms. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and four children.

advisory council

Steve Almond is the author of the story collection My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002) and the non-fiction book Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. His second story collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, was published this Spring by Algonquin. A novel co-written with Juliana Baggott called Which Brings Me to You will appear in Spring, 2006. To see what kind of music he listens to, check out www.candyfreak.com.

Arthur Golden is the author of Memoirs of a Geisha, which became a national bestseller and received high critical acclaim. Golden was born in Tennessee and was educated at Harvard College where he received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned his master's degree in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. Following a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo, and after returning to the United States, earned a master's degree in English from Boston University.

Esmond Harmsworth is a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. Born in London, he was educated in England and graduated with honors from Brown University and Harvard Law School. Harmsworth represents fiction and nonfiction. Books Harmsworth has recently represented include: the literary novel Wilderness Run by Maria Hummel, the narrative nonfiction adventure story The Last River by Todd Balf; the New York Times bestselling and Edgar-award winning Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI and a Devils Deal by Dick Lehr and the mystery Lover's Crossing by James C. Mitchell. Esmond is in charge of the agency's foreign rights department and deals directly with publishers in London.

Tim Huggins provides innovative programming ideas and knows just about every writer in town. A Mississippi native, Tim is the founder of Newtonville Books, an award-winning, independent bookstore located in Newton, Massachusetts. He is also the cofounder of the critically acclaimed Earfull series, a writers-and-musicians series that mixes book nerds and cool rock people by combining great writing, live music and beer. Tim lives in Watertown with his daughter, Ilana.

Peter Keating is the president of Keating & Company, Inc. and Keating Holdings LP, both real estate businesses in Boston. He helped start Epiphany School, a tuition-free middle school in Dorchester, in 1997, and served as the school’s board president from 1997 to 2006. He remains an Epiphany trustee and teaches twice a week at the school. He has been involved as a director on several non-profit boards and currently tries to leave home late and get home early to be with his wife, Alix, and their two young children, Nate and Eliza.

Jill Kneerim, director and a founder of Kneerim & Williams, a literary agency based at Fish & Richardson PC in Boston, represents a wide range of authors including Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States; best-selling novelist Brad Meltzer; Edward Hallowell, co-author of Driven to Distraction and author of Connect; historian Pauline Maier, author of American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence; the philosopher Sissela Bok; literary historian and critic Stephen Greenblatt; and leading women thinkers and spokeswomen such as Dr. Susan Love, former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Murphy, and lecturer Jean Kilbourne. Jill is a former editor and publisher who has worked for Simon and Schuster, American Heritage, the Sierra Club and Grossman Publishers, a publishing house that she co-founded. She is a member of the executive committee of PEN New England. In its May 2003 issue, Boston Magazine names her one of the 100 most influential women in the city.

Margot Livesey is the award-winning author of a story collection, Learning by Heart, and of the novels Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture and, most recently, Banishing Verona. Eva Moves the Furniture was a New York Times Notable Book, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year, and a PEN/Winship finalist. Born in Scotland, Margot currently lives in the Boston area, where she is writer in residence at Emerson College.

Sue Miller has written seven novels, including Lost in the Forest, While I Was Gone, and The Good Mother; a collection of short stories, and a memoir ' all of which have been widely translated. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Carl Sandburg Prize from the Chicago Public Library, and she has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and for The Orange Prize.

Susan Orlean is currently writing a series of American popular culture columns, called Popular Chronicles, for The New Yorker where she has been a staff writer since 1992. Prior to joining The New Yorker, Orlean was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and at Vogue, where she wrote on numerous figures in both the music and fashion industries. In addition to her magazine work, she is the author of of several books, including, "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere,"; "The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Ordinary People,"; "Saturday Night"; and "Red Sox and Blue Fish". In 1999, she published "The Orchid Thief," (1999) a best-selling narrative about orchid poachers in Florida. "The Orchid Thief" was made into the movie, "Adaptation," written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Susan received her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan in 1976 and attended Harvard as a Nieman Fellow in 2004. Susan lives in Boston with her husband and her very cute son.

Pamela Painter is the author of the award-winning collection, Getting to Know the Weather, and a new collection, titled The Long and Short of It. With her co-author Anne Bernays, Painter is currently revising her textbook on writing, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and Story, among others, and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and Microfiction. Painter is a founding editor of StoryQuarterly and recently edited issue #33, which includes the work of three Emerson students. She has received two Pushcart Prizes for her fiction, and Agni's John Cheever Award for Fiction, and also received fellowships from the Illinois and Massachusetts Arts Councils, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has a BA from Pennsylvania State University and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Tom Perrotta is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel The Abstinence Teacher. He is also the author of the novel Little Children, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet and garnered Tom both an Oscar and a Golden Globe nomination for his adapted screenplay. Another of Tom's novels, Election, was made into a critically acclaimed film, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Tom is also the author of the novels The Wishbones and Joe College and a collection of stories, Bad Haircut: Stories from the Seventies. He lives in Belmont with his wife, Mary Granfield.

Heidi Pitlor is a Senior Editor at Houghton Mifflin Company. She oversees The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing, and edits literary fiction and some literary nonfiction. She has worked with a wide range of authors, including National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ward Just, National Book Award winner John Barth, David Leavitt, Stacey D'Erasmo, two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner John Edgar Wideman, Carolyn Cooke, Jake Halpern, Daniel Wallace (author of Big Fish), and many others. Heidi is also a writer. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, and her first novel, The Birthdays, will be published in June, 2006. She received her BA from McGill University and her MFA in creative writing from Emerson College.

Jeffrey F. Rayport is founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, a unit of Monitor Group, the Cambridge-based strategic advisory services and merchant banking firm. A former professor at Harvard Business School, Rayport developed and taught the first e-commerce course in the United States. Prior to joining the HBS faculty, Rayport was a reporter for Fortune, a telecommunications analyst for Nikko Securities (in Tokyo), and a principal of the Winthrop Group, a consulting firm specializing in the history of business and technology. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Boston Globe, CIO Magazine, Financial Times, Fast Company, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Magazine, The Industry Standard, The Los Angeles Times, McKinsey Quarterly, and Strategy & Business, and he has appeared on numerous occasions as a business commentator on television and radio, including The Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, "Marketplace" and "The Connection" on National Public Radio, and on ABC News. With co-author Bernard J. Jaworski, Rayport has published three leading MBA-level textbooks on strategy in the networked economy (e-Commerce, Cases in e-Commerce, and Introduction to e-Commerce) with McGraw-Hill/Irwin, and he has a forthcoming trade book on service strategies in the digital age from Harvard Business School Press. Rayport earned an A.B. from Harvard College, an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Cambridge (U.K.), an A.M. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University, and a Ph.D. at Harvard in Business History. He serves as a director of several public and private companies, including Andrews McMeel Universal (parent of Universal Press Syndicate), CBS MarketWatch (MKTW), GSI Commerce (GSIC), International Data Group, and ValueClick (VCLK). He is also a trustee of several educational organizations, including the Hult International School of Business (an accredited MBA program designed for international mid-career students, based in Cambridge, MA), and From The Top, Inc. (the producer of "From The Top," a one-hour classical music radio program that features talented youth from across the United States, and is distributed on over 300 FM radio stations by Public Radio International).

Hank Phillippi Ryan changes laws and changes lives. She's recovered millions of dollars for scammed consumers, saved dozens of homes from foreclosure, sent wrong-doers to prison and forced state officials to resign. She is widely regarded as one of the most hard-hitting, informative investigative reporters in the region, having won numerous awards for her work. Her leading-edge consumer and investigative reports, "Hank Investigates," have become not only widely acclaimed, but also viewers' favorites. Hank is a reporter with more than 50 prestigious awards from news organizations all over the world, including 24 Emmy awards. Most recently, she won two 2004 Emmys and this year's 2005 Emmy for her investigative and consumer reporting, including an expose' of the failures of the state's 911 emergency system and a hidden camera investigation revealing widespread deceptive pricing. She also won a recent Edward R. Murrow Award, her 10th, for her investigative series "Cause for Alarm," which revealed extensive staffing and equipment dangers in fire departments across Massachusetts. "Cause for Alarm" was also honored in world-wide competition with the first place award from the International Firefighters Association. After breaking a highly acclaimed investigative series exposing unregulated home improvement contractors, who ripped off home owners in three of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, three new laws were passed. Before joining 7NEWS in 1982, Hank was a reporter and anchor at WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia, she also worked at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, Indiana and on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant to a subcommittee of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. Hank also covered Washington D.C. as an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone Magazine. She wrote and edited a column called "Capitol Chatter" an inside look at D.C. politics. She also helped organize the presidential campaign coverage for Hunter S. Thompson. Hank grew up in the Indianapolis area, attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, and studied abroad at the International School in Hamburg, Germany.She and her husband live in a Boston suburb.