meet our instructors

instructor bios

S - Z

Sue Williams

Sue Williams is a British writer living near Boston. She taught English and Drama in schools and colleges across the UK, and her fiction has been published in numerous magazines including Narrative, Night Train, Salamander, Gargoyle and Redivider. A firm believer in the power of the story, Sue has acted in and directed plays, led oral storytelling workshops, and used art and music to inspire the writing process. She is currently an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. Her educational resources have also appeared in print. You can find her online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.

TBA

Maribeth Sanabria

Maribeth Sanabria is an editor and agent with over 10 years experience in the publishing industry. As a former freelance editor, she has worked with contacts from Charlesbridge, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, and WGBH, to name a few.  As the founding agent at Arro Literary, Maribeth has helped advance the careers of several children's book authors. Locally, she represents Beth Raisner Glass who is co-author of Noises at Night, now in its fourth printing, and the soon to be released series picture book Blue Ribbon Dad (Abrams, 2011). Maribeth is a graduate of Boston College with degrees in education and communications. Her primary interests are picture books for children, as well as middle grade novels and young adult fiction and nonfiction.

James Scott

James Scott earned his MFA from Emerson College and his BA from Middlebury College. His fiction has been published in One Story, American Short Fiction, and Memorious among others, anthologized by flatmancrooked, and nominated for the Best New American Voices Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, New York State Summer Writers' Institute, and Millay Colony for the Arts. James has worked for various production companies and publications, Bob Vila productions, and the Boston Red Sox. A former fiction editor of Redivider, he currently works for One Story and the music magazine Under the Radar.

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.

Janet Silver

Janet Silver, the Literary Director of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth agency, brings more than three decades of experience as an acclaimed editor and publishing executive to her work as a literary agent. She joined the agency after 25 years at Houghton Mifflin Company, where she was Vice President and Publisher. Throughout her long career, Silver has remained committed to supporting exceptional writers of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. Her clients benefit from both her in-depth knowledge of the publishing process and her industry-wide reputation as the renowned editor of many celebrated writers, including Philip Roth, Tim O'Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cynthia Ozick, Monique Truong, and Jonathan Safran Foer. As a publisher, she oversaw the release of such groundbreaking works as Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Silver’s clients at ZSH are writers recognized for their original voices, narrative skill, and proven expertise. Recent major sales include the memoir Wild by novelist Cheryl Strayed (Knopf), recounting her solo trek on the Pacific Crest trail; Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human (Doubleday), an inside look at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence; and award-winning writer Michael Byers’ Percival’s Planet (Holt), a novel based on the discovery of Pluto in 1930.

Adam Stumacher

Adam Stumacher's fiction has been published in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, 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 and has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. 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.

Cam Terwilliger

Cam Terwilliger is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship and a Somerville Arts Council Fiction Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Post Road, The Mid-American Review, The Greensboro Review, The Sycamore Review and others. Cam’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Additionally, he holds an MFA from Emerson College, and has served as a reader for The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and as a judge for The Rhode Island Council on the Arts Fiction Fellowship.

Becky Tuch

Becky Tuch has won several awards for her fiction (from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine and The Tennessee Writer's Alliance) and received Honorable Mentions from the 2008 Pushcart Prize Anthology and Writers' Journal. She has published stories, poetry and art and reviews in numerous publications including Blueline, Eclipse, Folio, The Connecticut River Review, Artsmedia and The Women's Review of Books. She is also the founding editor of TheReviewReview.net, a website which reviews literary magazines and offers publishing tips to writers. Her website and commitment to the writing life were featured in The Somerville News in the winter of 2009. She teaches fiction to kids, teens and adults throughout Boston.

Adrian Van Young

Adrian Van Young attended Columbia University's MFA Program in Fiction, where he now teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program. He is the recipient of a 2008 Henfield Foundation Prize and was nominated for inclusion in Best New American Voices 2010. He has taught fiction and expository writing at 826 NYC, Columbia University, The Calhoun School and, most recently, Grub Street. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in Lumina and Gigantic.

Joanne Wyckoff

Joanne Wyckoff is an agent in the Boston office of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.  Before becoming an agent, she worked as Senior Editor at the Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, and as Executive Editor at Beacon Press.  As an agent, Joanne represents nonfiction and fiction.  She has a particular love of the memoir and is always looking for exciting new voices in this genre.  Her nonfiction list includes books in narrative nonfiction, psychology, women’s issues, education, health and wellness, serious self-help, natural history and anything about animals, biography, religion and spirituality, and African-American issues.  In fiction, her interests run to literary and commercial women’s fiction, novels that evoke a strong sense of place, and historical novels.  Some notable recent publications include The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life by NPR commentator Lauretta Hannon (Gotham), Becoming a Life Change Artist by highly regarded life planning expert Fred Mandell, Ph.D., and organizational psychologist, Kathleen Jordan, Ph.D.(Avery), and My Green Manifesto: A Rallying Cry for the Rest of Us by well known nature writer David Gessner (Milkweed, forthcoming).

Amy Yelin

Amy Yelin has published essays and memoir in the Boston Globe, Globe Magazine, the Gettysburg Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her essay “Torn” (originally published in the Baltimore Review), was recognized as a notable essay of 2006 in the Best American Essays 2007. Excerpts from her interview with author Amy Krouse Rosenthal are included in the 826 Guide to Writing Your Memoir, and she has an essay in the forthcoming anthology Mamas and Papas. 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. She has been awarded 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 yelinwords.wordpress.com and she blogs (occasionally) at ihadamindonce.blogspot.com.