What's launching your book really like? 

By Katrin Schumann

Your first event is with a panel of authors in front of a crowd of 200 people. You buy new lipstick and pray your voice doesn’t quiver.

The alarm rings at 5am. The Uber doesn’t turn up. On the road late!

Within three days of your book launch, you catch a cold and lose your voice. It's so bad that you have to postpone your big radio interview.

Ahh, April. The birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and new short classes are springing up at GrubStreet. Take a look at some of this month's exciting offerings:

April 8th, 12th & 13th

• Pieces of Me: Writing about Gender

The April 2019 edition of "Writing Life Essentials," a monthly hand-curated list of contests, grants, scholarships, submissions calls, and awards, with a focus on opportunities that are at least one of the following: local, free to apply, and/or committed to celebrating and supporting writers from historically marginalized communities. We do the research, so you have more time for what matters: the writing. Or, the stopping to smell the flowers. That matters too.

In the April 2019 edition of "Best of Boston," we bring you our top Boston lit events this month, curated from the Boston Literary District's event calendar, an essential source of literary happenings.

Jericho Brown: Poetry Reading

The Muse and the Marketplace 2019 kicks off on April 5th at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. This year’s theme is writing in a time of upheaval — whether such upheaval is personal, political, artistic, or all of the above. In anticipation of the conference, we’ve asked Muse 2019 presenting authors to describe a time when it was impossible for them to write, but they wrote anyway