The Grub Street Rag, 3/24/08

March 24th, 2008

In this issue
Concise Grub Gossip
Effulgent Grub Events
Spreading the Love
"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."

~ Thoreau


Grub Street Gossip

Welcome to the latest installment of the Grub Street Rag, a newsletter of the Boston literary scene sent out every Monday by the attack dogs at Grub Street's world headquarters. As always, if you are receiving this e-mail in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.

The final fifty: get your Muse on soon!
Our Muse and the Marketplace literary conference is five weeks away, and is now 85% full. We have fewer than fifty spots left (out of 330) for the full weekend and/or Saturday or Sunday only. For those of you interested in meeting with an editor or agent in our Manuscript Mart, only two editors and two agents remain. The conference features craft seminars led by some of the most established authors, panels and one-on-one manuscript consultations, and a keynote address by Jonathan Franzen. Check out the details and we'll see you next month!

Grub's growing!

Guess what? We're hiring! Grub Street is seeking a part-time Outreach Coordinator to join us in our bustling non-profit office. The candidate (you?) will coordinate all elements of Grub Street’s outreach programs and provide strong administrative support for the Grub Street office. If you have excellent management, communication and organizational skills, work experience, and love creative writing, go to www.idealist.org to read the full description, and submit your resume by March 28th.

Department of Heraldic Trumpets
As always, we have lots of great news to report. First, we are thrilled to announce that longtime Grub instructor Jenna Blum's second novel, The Stormchasers, has been sold to Dutton, a Penguin imprint. For more information on the novel's publication--and to follow Jenna on her third research round of stormchasing this May--please visit her at www.jennablum.com. Second, new Grub instructor Sara Pennypacker, who will be teaching the Fiction for Children course on June 28-29th, just won the Golden Kite award (given by the society of children's book writers and illustrators) for best picture book text of 2007 for her book Pierre In Love. Grub Street member Dr. Susan A. Berger has been working with Grace Talusan as her editor to complete writing her book: The Five Identities of Grief: How the Death of a Loved One Transforms You. Susan began writing her book proposal in 2000 after taking a class in creative non-fiction with instructor, Michelle Seaton. Working with her agent, Susan received significant interest from many major publishing houses, 4 offers, and finally accepted Shambhala Publications’ generous offer. The book is expected to be in stores in the Summer 2009. Next, Karen Dempsey, a student in Alexis Rizzuto's Master Memoir class, wrote in to let us know she just had an excerpt of her memoir, Tethered Cord: Liddy's First Years, accepted for publication in Brain, Child magazine. Next up, our 2007 Fiction Book Prize Winner, Stray by Sheri Joseph, is now available in paperback and also is a finalist for a Lambda Award. And last but not least, Grubbie Matt Frederick's book, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School has been doing amazingly well. Since October (pub date September 30th) it's gone into three printings (37,500 copies to date, sold in six languages/territories, and just got on the Booksense bestseller list and is the number one architecture book at Amazon. Congratulations to all!

Cheers,
Whitney, Sonya and Chris

The P.S.: For all of you who signed up for the Manuscript Mart, this is a reminder to get your manuscript in by the deadline. Deadline? What deadline? That's April 2nd by 5pm. Don't forget!