We are leaping for joy about these community success stories this February! Grubbies were published in literary journals across the country, won awards and prizes, secured book deals, and so much more. Our community is closing February 2024 with twenty-one publications, five awards and prizes, two fellowships, and six book publications! Let us celebrate you: submit your good news to GrubStreet’s Department of Congratulations.

Linda Woolford's short story "An Entirely Different Girl" will appear in Chestnut Review's spring issue. Paulette Stout's third novel, What Eyes Can't See, a story of love, social justice, and belonging, was published on February 6. Leticia Priebe Rocha’s debut poetry chapbook, In Lieu of Heartbreak, This is Like, is out now with Bottlecap Press. Several of the poems in this collection were drafted during Otto Vock's "6 Weeks, 6 Poems" course. Level Best Books has published Book 2 of the Nutshell Murder Mystery series, Three-Decker Murder in a Nutshell, by Frances McNamara. Essay Incubator graduate Sara Schreur's essay "Finding 'the real thing' with U2 at Sphere" appeared in WBUR's Cognoscenti.

Emily May's debut collection of essays, Some Girls, was shortlisted by Galileo Press, and selected for publication later this year. Many of the essays have been workshopped in GrubStreet classes and have benefited from the keen attention and thoughtful feedback of Xujun Eberlein, Shuchi Saraswat, and Ethan Gilsdorf. Memoir Incubator alum Dr. Tamara MC is one of twenty-one Arizona artists awarded a Research & Development Grant this year from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, funded by the State of Arizona and Arizona Community Foundation. B. B. Garin's short story "Last Night at the Morrison Hotel" was published by Orca Literary Journal. She'd like to thank Blair Hurley's revision class for their help in bringing this story back to life.

Stephanie Mohr's prose poem "The Bumblebees" will be published in March 2024 in Willows Wept Review. The piece began as a response to a prompt in Kayleigh Shoen's November 2022 class, "Flash Fiction QuickWrites: 3 Hours, 3 Prompts." Novel Incubator alum Karen Wilfrid's debut middle-grade novel, Just Lizzie, was selected as an honoree for the Rise 2024 Booklist. Each year, Rise recommends recent books for young readers with significant feminist content. 23'-24' Emerging Writer Fellow Malik Thomspon is the winner of the Writer’s Center Compass Fellowship.

Steve Dahill is happy to announce the publication of his second historical fiction novel, with a strong Boston Waterfront connection, Clipper Wars – a sequel to his successful debut novel, Secrets of Mary Celeste (2023). Boston Writers of Color member Cynthia Yee will be the subject of a short documentary produced by the Oscar Award-winning Breakwater Studios of Los Angeles. The film directors Nicholas Wright and Lukas Dong found her through community connections and her website. They decided to focus on her after going through their list of potential Chinatown subjects because they felt she was “on the ground,” had many community connections, and wrote about girlhood and the trauma of displacement – a subject especially meaningful today in the rapidly changing landscape of Boston.

Alexandra Grabbe is pleased that the Washington Independent Review of Books shared her essay, “A Writer by Any Other Name,” and thanks Ethan Gilsdorf for being her favorite go-to essay instructor. Manuscript consultant and instructor Cheryl Eagan-Donovan's article "Henslowe, Alleyn, Burbage & Shakespeare: Staging the Myth" was published in the peer-reviewed journal The Oxfordian Volume 25. Alex Thayer's debut novel, Happy & Sad & Everything True, is available to pre-order. Elizabeth Christopher's essay about returning to nursery school was published in The Boston Globe Magazine.

Instructor A.J. Rodriguez's short story "Americanos" is the second-place winner of Salamander's Fiction Contest, and it was published in Issue 57 of the magazine. Essay Incubator alum and Boston Public Schools teacher Jennifer Dines's essay "The Language of Learning" was published in the anthology Gifted-ish: Women and Nonbinary Writers on Intelligence, Identity and Education. Memoir Incubator graduate Ann MacDonald recently published an opinion essay, "Rhode Island's new sepsis regulations will save lives," in The Boston Globe. She thanks instructor Laura Kiesel and fellow students Aime Card and Joana Galarza for helping her understand how to write this type of essay.

Essay Incubator instructor Ethan Gilsdorf had a radio essay as part of the "Love letters to Boston" series featured on WBUR's Morning Edition and published in WBUR's Cognoscenti. Work by several other Grubbies was also featured, including Essay Incubator graduates Thuy Phan, Kristen Paulson-Nguyen, and Marion Williams-Bennett. David Hallock Sanders, whose novel Busara Road was published with the help of guidance from several Muse and Marketplace workshops and agent sessions, will see one of his short stories, The New Moon in the Old Moon's Arms, made into a movie, with filming to begin in July. Andrea Caswell's interview with author Danuta Hinc was published in Issue 44 of Cleaver Magazine.

BWOC community member Mee Ok Icaro has been selected as one of nine 2024 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellows in Memoir out of a highly competitive pool of 148 nominees. Short Story Incubator graduate Sarah Michelson's debut play, Dybbrooke, will premiere at the Atlanta Fringe Festival this summer. She is excited to break into the world of playwriting and thanks her GrubStreet instructors and mentors for helping her develop her skills as a storyteller. Jeffrey M. Feingold's short story collection, There Is No Death in Finding Nemo, is a finalist for The Wishing Shelf Book Awards.