Publishing in Your Fifties and Beyond: A Panel Discussion with Thatcher Carter, Mandeliene Smith, and E. Dolores Johnson

Event Description

It’s never too late to tap into your creativity and make good on your dreams! GrubStreet’s founder Eve Bridburg will moderate a conversation among fiction authors Thatcher Carter, author of Razed, Mandeliene Smith, author of Rutting Season, and memoirist E. Dolores Johnson, author of Say I'm Dead, about their experiences publishing and launching their debut books in mid-life. Join us for an illuminating conversation about their unique experiences with writing and publishing, tapping into creativity later in life, and routines or rituals that help them sustain their practice.

This event is free, and registration is requested.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Thatcher Carter was born into a long line of grudge-keepers from Connecticut. Both her parents stopped talking to their siblings for decades, and she grew up trying to understand the mysteries of human relationships. Understandably, she turned to books for comfort and knowledge, and she continues to be an obsessive reader to this day. For twenty-five years, she taught English at Riverside City College. She now lives in Ontario, Canada with her husband and exuberant Springer Spaniel. She has published essays in Under the Gum Tree, Cargo Literary, Awake in the World, and Writing from Inlandia. RAZED is her first novel.

E. Dolores Johnson is the author of her family memoir, Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets and Love (Chicago Review Press). It received an Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, a starred review from the American Library Association’s Booklist and a Must Read designation from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her published essays have appeared in Narratively, the Buffalo News, Hippocampus, Pangyrus, Lunch Ticket and elsewhere. She is currently tackling an historical fiction book.

Mandeliene Smith is the author of a short story collection, Rutting Season (Scribner, 2018), and a 2023 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Sun, and the New England Review, among other publications. She lives in a Boston suburb where she is currently (endlessly?) working on a novel.

Eve Bridburg is the Executive Director of GrubStreet. Under her 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. The Barr Foundation recently named her a 2019 Barr Fellow in recognition of her leadership. 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. Eve worked as a literary agent at The Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency 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.