Dawn Tripp is a favorite among Boston-area writers and readers—and for good reason. I first met her at the Boston Book Festival where I moderated a fiction panel we quickly dubbed “Three Blondes and a Brit.” There we were: James MacManus, author of the acclaimed forthcoming Midnight in Berlin, Holly LeCraw, best-selling author of The Half Brother, Tripp, who nailed the Massachusetts Book Award with her second novel, and me. Though I hadn’t met Dawn before or known her books, she had such an open-armed kind of warmth, and such a passion for other writers and their work, that ...

Alexander Chee’s second novel, The Queen of the Night, has topped nearly every “2016 must-read” list that flooded the Internet in January, and the response to each was ecstatic. Chee is not only a writer’s writer, but a great friend to writers

Michelle Hoover, Instructor for Grub's Novel Incubator program, is a verified expert in the field of writerly etiquette. Here, she offers her best advice on workshop citizenship and shows us exactly how she keeps the Incubator classroom a supportive space for writers. 

It seems like a recipe for torture

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies elbowed out some of its competition last Wednesday when the National Book Award announced its 2015 finalists, but of any writer I know, I don’t expect such adulation to go to Groff’s head. I first met Lauren at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where she was a fellow and I had somehow earned the nickname “Buffy the Copy Machine Slayer” in my role as conference office staff

It was on Facebook where I first got wind of William Giraldi’s NYT review of Alix Ohlin’s two new books, when a much admired friend and writer raged in his response:  “This is a disgrace…William Giraldi can't write worth a damn.”  Within a few days, the post received ninety responses, many of them linking to other lists of responses, all of them berating Giraldi as eloquently and creatively as writers so effortlessly can