Draft Feedback

Draft-level revision and craft guidance

The Draft Feedback program offers writers the chance to receive personalized, rigorous, and thoughtful feedback from one of GrubStreet’s expert creative writing instructors. Within two weeks of receiving your draft, your instructor will share the kind of feedback usually reserved for advanced workshops: craft-driven, in-depth, and focused on helping your piece move forward.

You’ll receive a detailed editorial letter that identifies what’s working in your draft, names the piece’s strengths, and offers clear, actionable suggestions for revision. In addition to this letter, your instructor will engage directly with your language through thoughtful in-line edits, responding at the sentence level and flagging moments of particular resonance, confusion, or opportunity.

Writers often use this program when they’re:

Revising a draft they’ve already workshopped and need next-step guidance
Preparing a piece for submission, publication, or the Agent and Editor Manuscript Mart
Feeling stuck and wanting an expert reader to help clarify what the work wants to be

You may also request publishing advice, suggestions for further reading, and generative prompts designed to help you deepen or reimagine the piece. Optional 30-minute video consultations are available for writers who want to talk through feedback in real time, ask follow-up questions, or strategize revision plans.

How It Works

Browse our participating instructors and decide who you’d like to work with.
Visit our Payment Page to select the number of pages (up to 10, 15, or 20 pages) you’d like feedback on and complete checkout.
After checkout, you’ll receive access to a form where you can upload your work, share your goals, and select your instructor.
Your instructor will be notified of your project, and we’ll let you know when they begin working on it (within 48 business hours of receipt).
Within two weeks or less, you’ll receive your written feedback. If you’ve added a video consultation, your instructor will contact you directly to schedule your meeting.

What You Send Us

You’ll upload your manuscript as a Word document, double-spaced in 12-point font. If your formatting is off, we’ll adjust it for you — but feedback will be limited to the number of double-spaced pages you’ve purchased.

You’ll also be asked to share a brief note addressing:

Your primary concerns about the piece
What you’re hoping to better understand or clarify
Any context that would help your instructor engage more deeply with the work

Finally, you’ll have the option to request specific elements in your feedback, such as publishing advice, generative prompts, or further reading.

What We Send You

In two weeks or less, you’ll receive:

A one-page, single-spaced feedback letter, in the spirit of an advanced workshop, offering focused, high-level editorial guidance
Responses tailored to your most pressing questions and hopes for the piece
In-line edits on your manuscript that respond directly to your craft choices
Together, these materials are designed to help you see your work more clearly, and take confident, informed steps toward revision.

Participating Instructors

Lauren Artiles

Genres: Short Fiction | Novel | Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction

Lauren Artiles (she/they) is the Director of Community Engagement and Events. In this role, she supervises GrubStreet's events, Manuscript Mart and Manuscript Month, Intensive alumni and membership programming, and partner initiatives; and works to cultivate a warm, welcoming third place where every writer feels at home and empowered at each stage of their artistic journey. Lauren teaches and writes short fiction. She received an MFA in Writing from CalArts and is an alum of GrubStreet's Short Story Incubator program. Lauren's writing has been supported by a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Outside of work, her greatest pleasures include reading freaky little novellas, cooking elaborate meals for loved ones, watching horror movies, and tending to both her real garden and her garden of carefully curated playlists.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Genres: Short Fiction | Novel

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the author of the novel, Names Have Been Changed, which will be published by Tiny Reparations Books on June 23, 2026. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, won the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize, and been shortlisted for the Sewanee Review Fiction Contest and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is also the co-author of the nonfiction title, Singapore: A Biography, and the editor of two anthologies of fiction by writers from Singapore. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University and has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Elizabeth George Foundation, Sewanee Writers Conference, Ragdale Foundation and Vermont Studio Center. Originally from Singapore, she lives in Boston.

Monica Benevides

Monica Benevides (née Busch) is an award-winning writer and editor based in Massachusetts.She founded and edits the literary magazine Talk Vomit and teaches undergraduate writing courses. Previously, she was a senior staff writer at the Worcester Business Journal. Her freelance work appears in places like Bitch, Man Repeller, and the Columbia Journalism Review. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University.

Jennifer Crystal

Genres: Memoir | Essay | General Creative Nonfiction | Poetry

Jennifer Crystal runs the Writing to Heal Immersive Program at GrubStreet. She specializes in non-fiction, especially writing to heal/narrative medicine, travel writing, memoir, personal essays, and op-eds. Her memoir One Tick Stopped the Clock, was published by Legacy Book Press in September 2024 and her memoir Et Voilà: One Traveler's Journey from Foreigner to Francophile was published by Belfort and Bastion in 2015. Jennifer's work has appeared in Aeon's Psyche, The Boston Globe, wbur.org, poetryandcovid.com, Transitions Abroad, Abroad View, Spry Literary Journal, Harvard Health Blog, and many other publications. She writes a weekly column for Global Lyme Alliance, which has received mention in CQ Researcher, The New Yorker and weatherchannel.com. She holds an M.F.A. from Emerson College and a B.A. from Middlebury College and has completed a workshop in narrative medicine at Columbia University and a summer of study at the Bread Loaf School of English.

Nora Corrigan

Nora Corrigan is a writer from Massachusetts. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award for novel writing, and a MSc with distinction from the London School of Economics. She was a Postgraduate Fellow in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, a Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She has taught writing at the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts Boston. She lives in Spain with her husband and two children.

Kayla Degala-Paraíso

Kayla Degala-Paraíso (she/they) is an NYC-based, Filipinx-American experimental writer with a B.A. in Creative Writing. Although a professional cross-genre dabbler, she has a special affection for fabulism, hybrid forms (especially prose poetry), and strange creative nonfiction (especially memoir). She prioritizes voice and feeling in her work. In her writing, she also often attempts to untangle messy entanglements, challenge conventions of craft, sucker-punch you in the gut. She is currently working on a collection of haunted stories. Kayla publishes under "K. Degala-Paraíso". You can read her work in PANK, Okay Donkey, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Her work has received the Bea Matas Hollfelder Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Best Small Fictions nomination, and three Best of the Net nominations.

Ethan Gilsdorf

Genres: General Creative Nonfiction | Memoir

A GrubStreet instructor since 2007, Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, memoirist, essayist, critic, poet, teacher, performer, and nerd. He is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks (named a Massachusetts Center for the Book Mass Books Awards “Nonfiction Must-Read” and Nominated for the Alex Award by the Young Adult Library Services Association). Hundreds of his personal essays, articles, reviews, cultural commentaries, profiles, opinion pieces, short stories, and poems have appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Esquire, Boston Globe, Wired, Salon, O (the Oprah Magazine), Huffington Post, National Geographic, Brevity, Poetry, Poets & Writers, The Southern Review, North American Review, among other publications. Twice his work has been named "Notable" by The Best American Essays.

Tatiana Johnson-Boria

Genres: Memoir | Essay | General Creative Nonfiction | Poetry

Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in Poetry. As an educator, artist, facilitator, and mother, she uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, cultivate healing, and explore the complex magic of mothering. She has received fellowships and awards from Tin House, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, the Brother Thomas Fellowship, and St. Botolph Club Foundation, among others. Tatiana teaches at GrubStreet and has been on faculty at Emerson College, among other institutions. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, and more. She is represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.

Meghan Lamb

Meghan Lamb is the author of Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021), All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2019) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She has taught writing courses at Eötvös Loránd University, the University of Chicago, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis, and she served as the 2018 Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, Passages North, The Rumpus, and The Collagist, among other publications. She is currently the Nonfiction Editor of Nat. Brut, a journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields.

K.W. Onley

Genres: Short Fiction | Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction

K.W. Onley is a speculative fiction writer living in Maryland. She spends her time gathering community, contemplating the possible, discerning truth, and imagining the future—as much as she can in fiction. In her fiction, she writes stories featuring children of color who can traverse many worlds with the savvy to code-switch, challenge, and triumph as they go. She writes under multiple pen names, including K. Onley for middle-grade and K. W. Onley for adult fiction. K. is a proud graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, GrubStreet's Short Story Incubator, Viable Paradise, and Clarion West. Her work can be found in the Many Worlds anthology, FIYAH magazine, and Strange Horizons. When she is not leading or writing, Kyra knits, quilts, and embroiders.

A.J. Rodriguez

A.J. Rodriguez was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Oregon’s MFA program. His work has received the Granum Foundation Prize and been supported by MacDowell, Yaddo, the Kerouac Project, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Swamp Pink Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades. Others appear in Guernica, The Common, New England Review, and elsewhere. He has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon, Johnson & Wales University, and St. Albans School. A.J. is represented by Alexa Stark at Writers House.

Elizabeth Santiago

Genres: Novel | YA/MG Fiction | Romance Fiction

Elizabeth Santiago is the author of the acclaimed young adult novel The Moonlit Vine. She is a lifelong storyteller dedicated to uplifting untold narratives. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, a master’s in education from Harvard University, and a PhD from Lesley University focused on creative writing for literacy and liberation. Her debut novel, published by Lee and Low, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, was named a Best Teen & YA Novel of 2023 About Social Issues by Kirkus, and was honored on the Rise 2024 Booklist. She is also the founder of The Untold Narratives, a platform supporting marginalized voices in storytelling.

Angela Siew

Genres: Poetry

Angela Siew is a multilingual poet with a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Emerson College. She was most recently a Peter Taylor Fellow for the 2023 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and an Administrative Staff Scholar for the 2023- 2025 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has also received support from the City of Boston and is a 2025 Connecticut Artist Fellow. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Salamander, Meridian, and LEON Literary Review, among others. A chapbook, Coming Home, is available from Cut Bank (University of Montana). A former private tutor and English language teacher, she has also taught overseas in Chile and Italy.

Caroline Stewart

Genres: Short Fiction | Novel | Romance Fiction | Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction

Caroline Belle Stewart's stories can be found in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, No Tokens, and elsewhere. A teacher, organizer, and birdwatcher, Caroline is a recipient of fellowships from Monson Arts and MacDowell, and lives in Western MA.

Tim Weed

Tim Weed is the author of a story collection, A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, and a novel, Will Poole’s Island. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, The Millions, The Writer’s Chronicle, Talking Points Memo, and elsewhere, and has won awards or been shortlisted in the Writer's Digest Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the Montana Prize in Fiction, and many others. Tim is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program and teaches at Grub Street and in the Newport MFA in Creative Writing. His new novel, THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT, a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature, will be published by Podium in early 2025.

Carolyn Zaikowski

Carolyn Zaikowski is the current Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts. She is the author of the hybrid novel In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared widely, in such publications as Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Huffington Post, and Everyday Feminism. She holds an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and is currently a writing instructor, manuscript consultant, and death doula. Find her at carolynzaikowski.com and carolynzzz.substack.com.

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