meet our instructors

instructor bios

M - S

Ron MacLean

Ron MacLean is author of the story collection Why the Long Face? (2008) and the novel Blue Winnetka Skies (2004). His fiction has appeared in GQ, Greensboro Review, Prism International, Night Train, Other Voices and other quarterlies. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and has been a proud part of team Grub since 2004.

Michael Marano

Michael Marano is a literary horror and dark science fiction writer, with stories in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 11 and Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories from the Edge; his first novel Dawn Song won the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards. He is Fiction Editor of the award-winning dark fiction magazine Chiaroscuro (www.chizine.com). Stories From the Plague Years, a collection of Marano's new and reprinted short fiction, is now in preparation at Cemetery Dance Publications. Since 1990, he has also been reviewing movies and doing pop culture commentary for the Public Radio Satellite System program Movie Magazine International, syndicated in more than 111 markets in the US and Canada. His articles have appeared in venues like The Boston Phoenix, The Weekly Dig, The Independent Weekly, Paste Magazine, and Science Fiction Universe.

Amy Marcott

Amy Marcott has taught creative writing and composition at Penn State University, where she received an MFA. She received her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University. She is the recipient of a Somerville Arts Council fellowship, and her fiction has appeared in Memorious, Juked, and Six Sentences, was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize, won third place in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest, was a finalist in Glimmer Train's Fiction Open Contest, and has been nominated for Scribner's Best New American Voices anthology and the Associated Writing Programs' Intro Awards. Her first novel is currently under consideration. She has been a professional writer and editor for many years and currently plies her trade at MIT, where she's an active blogger and social media marketer and assists with incorporating new technologies into online strategies.

Jill McDonough

Jill McDonough's poem "Accident, Mass. Ave." recently won a Pushcart prize and made Rachel Maddow cry. Her first book of poems, Habeas Corpus, was published by Salt in 2008. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, Stanford's Stegner program, and elsewhere, she has been teaching writing at the college level and beyond for ten years. Her work appears in Slate, The Threepenny Review, and a lot of other places.

Wendy Mnookin

Wendy Mnookin's fourth book of poems, The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, was published by BOA Editions in 2008. Her previous collection, What He Took, won the book prize from the New England Poetry Club. She is also the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches a poetry workshop at Emerson College and has taught courses and workshops for children and adults throughout the Boston area. She received her BA from Radcliffe College and her MFA in Writing from Vermont College. You can find out more at www.wendymnookin.com.

Kathleen Willis Morton

Kathleen Willis Morton holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her first book, The Blue Poppy and the Mustard Seed, was published by Wisdom Books. She has been published in Shambhala Sun Magazine, Hip Mama Magazine, and the anthology, Best Buddhist Writing 2009 published by Shambhala/Random House Publications. She can be reached at http://www.thebluepoppyandthemustardseed.com/.

Stuart Nadler

Stuart Nadler is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching Writing Fellowship. Most recently, he was the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin, where many of his students have gone to MFA programs. His fiction has been published in Esopus, the Avery Anthology, and this year two of his stories will appear in the Atlantic Monthly.

Nancy Nichols

Nancy A. Nichols is the author of Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town's Toxic Legacy. Published in 2008, the book has recently been awarded an honorable mention in the Rachel Carson Book Award contest sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists. A former senior editor at The Harvard Business Review, Nancy's writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation among other publications.

KL Pereira

KL Pereira writes poetry, nonfiction, cross-genre, and memoir. Pereira has taught poetry classes and writing workshops at East Boston High School, Casa Myrna Vasquez, Freedom House, The Women's Center, and Center for New Words and has served as an editor and writer for LiP Magazine, Whats Up Magazine/Spare Change News, advocacy publications by and for the homeless and underemployed. Her work has appeared in The Pitkin Review, Girlistic Magazine, The Hub Journal: Boston's Literary Occasional, Sui Generis, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, Whats Up Magazine/Spare Change News, Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia and the forthcoming Boy Culture: An Encyclopedia, both from Greenwood Press. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.

Sophie Powell

Sophie Powell was born in 1980, and split her time growing up between London and a sheep farm in the Brecon Beacons in Wales. She graduated in Classics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, where she was a junior scholar, and has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from New York University, where she had a fellowship. She is the author of the novel The Mushroom Man (Putnam Penguin) which received glowing reviews, including one from the New York Times Book Review, and which has been translated into several languages. She has also published short stories and creative nonfiction. Sophie lives in Boston with her husband, Christian, where she teaches creative writing at Boston College. Previously she has taught at New York University, Georgetown University, George Washington University and with the Lesley Seminars. She is also assistant director of Abroad Writers' Conferences. For more about Sophie, visit www.meetsophiepowell.com.

Hillary Rettig

Hillary Rettig is an author, workshop leader and coach who specializes in helping artists, activists, academics and other "ambitious dreamers" overcome procrastination and use their time better. The leading liberal blog, DailyKos.com, said of Hillary's book The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way (Lantern Books, 2006), "If I had but one book to spend hard-earned cash on this year, The Lifelong Activist would be it, hands down." Hillary's free, downloadable ebook, The Little Guide To Beating Procrastination, Perfectionism and Blocks, is available at her website www.lifelongactivist.com/downloads and Hillary may be reached at lifelongactivist@yahoo.com. Hillary is a New York City native and current Boston resident, who has published science fiction along with nonfiction. Some of the acclaimed science fiction writers she has studied with are Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delaney and the late Octavia Butler. A lifelong writer, her other passions include her family, her dogs, social justice and veganism.

Jane Roper

Jane Roper has taught fiction and novel workshops for Grub since 2004, after completing her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Salt Hill, CLR, Poets & Writers and DoubleX on Slate.com. She is also the author of Baby Squared, a narrative blog for the popular parenting site Babble.com. Jane’s forthcoming novel, Eden Lake, was a semifinalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She lives in Medford with her husband and daughters.

James Scott

James Scott has an MFA from Emerson College, where he was the fiction editor for Redivider. His work has been published in One Story, American Short Fiction, and Saint Ann's Review. A graduate of Middlebury College, James has worked for the Boston Red Sox and Bob Vila Productions. Currently, he is finishing a novel set in upstate New York in 1897.

Michelle Seaton

Michelle Seaton's book The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in an Age of Unfair Expectations, Diagnoses and Pills, co-authored with psychologist Dr. Anthony Rao, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August, 2009, and her essay "How to Work a Locker room" has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart. The essay is based on Seaton's 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. In addition to writing The Way of Boys, Seaton has also edited Living and Moving in 2021, a book about how aging Baby Boomers will change the way we travel, which is being published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. Seaton's previous book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, which she co-authored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, the Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. She has been a memoir instructor with Grub Street since 2000, and most recently created "Six Weeks, Six Essays." Seaton is 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 traveled to nine neighborhoods in Boston; its two anthologies are Born Before Plastic and My Legacy is Simply This. Seaton is a former associate editor for Yankee Magazine and a former senior contributor to Worth magazine. Her stories also have appeared in Robb Report, Bostonia, and other magazines.

David Shields

David Shields's most recent book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College's low-residency MFA Program for Writers. His work has been translated into ten languages.

His new book, Reality Hunger, is an ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of "reality" into their work. The questions Shields explores--the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real--play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a rigorous, radical reframing of how we might think about this "truthiness": about literary license, quotation, and appropriation in television, film, performance art, rap, and graffiti, in lyric essays, prose poems, and collage novels.

Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. Converts will see Reality Hunger as a call to arms; detractors will view it as an occasion to defend the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked about books of the season.

Clara Silverstein

Clara Silverstein is the author of the memoir White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation (University of Georgia Press), and two cookbooks, The Boston Chef's Table (Globe Pequot Press), and the New England Soup Factory Cookbook (Thomas Nelson) with chef Marjorie Druker, a top-selling soup cookbook on Amazon.com. A former food writer and editor at the Boston Herald, Silverstein's articles have also been published in Health magazine, Prevention, Runner's World, American Heritage, the Boston Globe, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She directs the Chautauqua Writers' Center, a summer creative writing program at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, and has led writing workshops at Grub Street, Boston University, and Emerson College.

Suzette Martinez Standring

Suzette Martinez Standring is a syndicated columnist with GateHouse News Service and author of The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry, Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists. It won First Place for Educational Book in The Florida Writers Association's competition. She is a contributor to The Boston Globe, The Patriot Ledger, The Huffington Post, Writer Magazine and has been featured on Boston's NPR. Visit her website.

Adam Stumacher

Adam Stumacher's fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, has been published in TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Carve, Barnstorm and The Sun, and was winner of the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. His nonfiction has appeared in the Guardian (UK) and the anthology Peace Under Fire. He holds degrees from Cornell University and Saint Mary's College, where he was recipient of the Jeanine Cooney and Agnes Butler fellowships. More recently, he was the the Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught undergraduate courses. In addition to his work at Grub Street, he teaches creative writing at MIT and has many years experience as an educator in urban high schools. He is the author of a short story collection, Slipknot, and is currently working on a novel, entitled A Liar's Opus.