GrubWrites

News on the Move: Poets, Podcasts, and more Programmatic Updates

How many exclamation points can one post hold? Read on to find out as GrubStreet's Founder and Executive Director, Eve Bridburg, shares programmatic news and other exciting updates on our move to the Seaport.

Dearest fellow grubbies,

Happy summer from the busiest GrubStreet August on record. Our literary dream team (read: the hardworking and talented GrubStreet staff) continues to juggle their “normal” work with the demands of funding, designing, and building our new home. In true GrubStreet fashion, we’re having fun as we scale this exciting mountain.

(From the top left to the right: Our whole staff taking a break during our summer staff day in P-Town;

Cafe meeting huddle with architects; Dariel Suarez and Lauren Rheaume at our first construction management meeting;

GrubStreet staff getting real with planning.)

Here’s a snapshot of the exciting program developments we’re planning for year one and beyond:

The poets are coming! First of all, we’re thrilled to be welcoming MassPoetry into the fold as an “arts organization-in-residence” at GrubStreet. From hosting the Massachusetts Poetry Festival to bringing poets into local schools, MassPoetry brings expertise in creative placemaking and innovative programming that reaches nearly 5,000 Massachusetts students each year. Executive Director Daniel Johnson and his team will be working from our offices where they’ll be dreaming about bringing Origami poetry flowers to parks nearby, getting writers onto boats in the harbor, hosting slam events on our stage, and bringing new poets into our classrooms.
Innovative new workshop models are coming! Dariel Suarez and Christopher Castellani, along with instructors Marjan Kamali, Dorian Fox, Shubha Sunder, Stacy Mattingly, and Nora Caplan-Bricker, have been experimenting with new workshop models this past year that offer a unique student-centered method of offering feedback. The team has learned a ton and feels confident and excited that they've found a better, more inclusive way of teaching. We will be launching the new workshop models more broadly as a permanent part of our curriculum when we land in our new home. We’ll also be launching new online models at the same time.
If only the ships could talk! We’re in conversation with the Boston Public Public Library about expanding our Memoir Project to include a new anthology about the Seaport neighborhood. We’re excited to learn more about the history of the Seaport. We want to hear stories from the people who have lived and worked there the longest. It’s not set in stone yet and might evolve, but for now we imagine sharing these stories from our new stage, publishing a sixth volume and archiving the entire collection at the library.
On Air! We’re building a podcasting studio alongside our classrooms and look forward to teaching podcasting and making the studio accessible to our community.
We want to hear from you! Given that this will be our home for the next thirty-five years, we plan to take our time and scale up slowly. We want to get to know the new space and to understand how our community wants to use it. And most importantly, we want to include your voices and ideas in our long-term planning. It's important to note that we plan on continuing to grow our programs in Boston's neighborhoods in partnership with the Boston Public Library and other community partners.

I don’t normally use this many exclamation points, but I can’t contain myself. They perfectly express my excitement about all the programming possibilities in our new space. Thanks for indulging me.

I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we have an evolving FAQ and we’re still all ears if you have anything you’d like to share with us.

I hope the rest of your summer is beautiful.

Warmest wishes,

Eve

About the Author

Eve Bridburg

Under Eve’s (she/her/hers) leadership, GrubStreet has grown into a national literary powerhouse known for artistic excellence, working to democratize the publishing pipeline and program innovation. An active partner to the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Eve was the driving force behind securing chapter 91 space in the Seaport to build a creative writing center. Eve was recently awarded the 2023 WNBA Award by the Woman's National Book Association, an award given every two years to a living American woman who has made exceptional contributions to the book industry beyond the scope of her profession. She is a 2019 Barr Fellow, and having graduated from its inaugural class, Eve remains active with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program, a consortium of 200 of the world’s top cultural leaders, which addresses the critical issues that face the arts and cultural sector worldwide. Eve has presented on the future of publishing, what it takes to build a literary arts center, and the intersection of arts and civics at numerous local and national conferences. Her essays and op-eds on publishing, the role of creative writing centers and the importance of the narrative arts have appeared in The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Cognoscenti, Writer's Digest and TinHouse. Eve serves on the Advisory Board of The Loop Lab, a new Cambridge-based nonprofit dedicated to increasing representation in the Media Arts and on the Advisory Board of Getting to We, a nonprofit dedicated to civic rights and social action. Eve worked as a literary agent at The Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency (now Aevitas Creatve Management) for five happy years where she developed, edited, and sold a wide variety of books to major publishers. Before starting GrubStreet, she attended Boston University’s Writing program on a teaching fellowship, farmed in Oregon, and ran an international bookstore in Prague.

See other articles by Eve Bridburg