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: July 7, 2026, 6:00pm–7:30pm | $35 for Non-Members, $25 for Members
One of our basest units of narrative is oftentimes the most elusive to codify, but acquiring the language—palpable, definable tactics —for building our stories better enables us to shape them. Together, we'll think through scene construction as both individual components and tools of cohesion, turning to several short stories and novels for reference. We will also walk through several short story constructions together, attaching tangible, actionable strategies to our collective story-building. We'll focus on fiction in our examples and dialogue, but this course is open to writers of all genres.
Instructor:
Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and an O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, his writing has also appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Time, GQ, and Esquire, among many other places. He is based in Tokyo.
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.
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.