Learn from Today's Most Influential Writers
GrubStreet’s Contemporary Craft Series brings you low-cost opportunities to learn directly from some of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. Each live, online seminar focuses on a unique craft topic, includes Q&A, and offers fresh insights you can apply to your writing right away. Recent teaching authors have included Melissa Febos, Katie Kitamura, Kaveh Akbar, Jennifer Haigh, Tony Tulathimutte, Catherine Lacey, and Jonathan Escoffery.
These special sessions are not recorded, so each is truly a one-time opportunity. Whether you’re brand new to GrubStreet or have been writing with us for years, these 90-minute seminars will fuel your creative inspiration and deepen your craft.
New sessions are added throughout the year — keep reading to see our currently scheduled Contemporary Craft seminars.
Upcoming Seminars
Date: August 31, 2026, 6:00pm–7:30pm | $35 for Non-Members, $25 for Members
Both of Hernán Díaz's novels, In the Distance and Trust, focus on blind spots in the American canon. The first concerns the territorial establishment of this nation: although many accounts glamorize the brutal expansion west, it took inordinately long for these narratives to coalesce into a genre—and once they did, they were largely marginalized. Not much later, America engaged in another sort of pursuit: a quest for economic supremacy. And though numerous books deal with class, conspicuous consumption, and manners, almost none addresses how money is actually made.
Instructor:
Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of four books published in thirty-seven languages, including the novels In the Distance and Trust. Trust received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Diaz's stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Harper's, Granta, and elsewhere.
Date: November 19, 2026, 6:00pm–7:30pm | $35 for Non-Members, $25 for Members
When memory fails, speculation can succeed. Learn techniques for turning the gaps in memory into some of your richest material.
Memory is not a transcript—it's a reconstruction, full of blind spots, contradictions, and missing pieces. Rather than treating imperfect memory as a liability, this class explores how the fault lines in memory can become the richest material in an essay. We'll examine how speculation, used deliberately, can carry a piece past the limits of what you actually remember and into deeper meaning.
You'll learn to give yourself permission to write from imperfect memory, and how fact-checking can serve not just accuracy but discovery, turning up discrepancies that spur new insights. We'll look at concrete techniques for segueing into speculation, and how small words like "why" and "perhaps" can act as hinges, swinging a piece open beyond the facts and into something truer.
Instructor:
Brenda Miller's new hybrid collection, Love You, Bye: A Daughter's Journey in Essays and Poems, is just out from Skinner House Books (April 2026). She is the author of six additional essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, and An Earlier Life, winner of the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and, with Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, now in its third edition. She coined the term “Hermit Crab Essay.”
Past Teaching Authors
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More seminars in the Contemporary Craft Series will become available throughout the year. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive announcements about:
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About GrubStreet
Want writing to be a bigger part of your life? GrubStreet, the nation’s leading creative writing center, helps you stay inspired, motivated, and connected. We offer classes, events, and community for writers of all backgrounds, both in person and online, and we’re on a mission to make creative writing accessible to people across all genres, backgrounds, and career stages.
Explore our upcoming workshops and learn more about becoming a member of our supportive writing community.