ARCHIVE FOR Candace McDuffie

The Muse and the Marketplace 2021 is almost here! This year's conference is taking the form of a virtual enhanced writing residency (taking place Wednesday, April 21st - Sunday, April 25th) with new Premium Workshops and the Manuscript Mart (taking place Wednesday, April 28th - Sunday, May 2nd).

This year's conference theme is "Small Victories." We all know what the "big" victories are (landing an agent, snagging a book deal, or getting a flashy award), but this year we aim to celebrate the equally important, tiny, and often unseen victories of our writing lives. In anticipation of the conference, …

GrubStreet instructor and author Candace McDuffie shares her experience writing 50 Rappers Who Changed The World. Arguably one of the most mainstream music styles today, rap was in fact born centuries ago in West Africa with historians or “griots” who used to tell stories of the past over the beat of a drum. But it wasn't until the 1970s in New York that rapping as we know it was born and began to flourish

Some call them writing workshops — I call them therapy sessions.

As a new instructor at GrubStreet, I thought I knew what to expect when I walked into my first "Jumpstart Your Writing" class this past January. We would discuss the setbacks students experience when it comes to writing, which would encompass everything from the misconceptions surrounding syntax to why they couldn't get their novel off the ground