Artistic director Dariel Suarez (GRS’12) (left) and founder and executive director Eve Bridburg (GRS’97) are leading GrubStreet into a bright future in the Seaport. Photo by Cydney Scott

Arts & Culture

Making Big Moves at GrubStreet

During the pandemic, the writing center got a new home in the Seaport, more users, and a strengthened focus on diversity

At GrubStreet’s gleaming new home in the Seaport, founder and executive director Eve Bridburg hopes everyone—from all neighborhoods and walks of life—will come in and follow that directive.

“GrubStreet always had a sense of inclusion from the very beginning,” says Bridburg (GRS’97), “and we’re trying to create something that is more welcoming, less paternalistic, and more inclusive.”

GrubStreet is Boston’s nationally known writing center, where thousands of people from the city and beyond come to shape their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry through classes, workshops, and the annual Muse & the Marketplace conference. Every year a number of “grubbies” have books and articles published for the first time, and that group grows ever more and more diverse by design.

Recent publications include the short story collection If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, former instructor and founder of GrubStreet’s Boston Writers of Color group ; the memoir Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by student and instructor Neema Avashia; and the novel The Long Answer by student Anna Hogeland. On Tuesday, GrubStreet will celebrate Boyah J. Farah’s memoir, America Made Me a Black Man, a searing account of American racism from a Somalian American who survived hardships in his birth country only to experience firsthand the dehumanization of Blacks in his adopted land. Farah is a graduate of GrubStreet’s yearlong Memoir Incubator program.

Bridburg started GrubStreet in 1997, offering writing workshops at a synagogue in Brookline, and she’s not the only BU grad with a hand on the controls. Novelist Dariel Suarez (GRS’12), a Cuban immigrant and author of The Playwright’s House, was recently named artistic director after several years in other leadership positions.

“Dariel has a global perspective on literature, which is really interesting and will lead us well as we activate this space and make exciting things happen on the stage and in our classrooms,” Bridburg says. “He’s also been a vital part of the senior leadership team through this period of incredible growth—and crisis. We lived through COVID together, and we had to do a lot of crisis management. And so I’ve just no doubt that he’s the right person for the job.”

Novelist Christopher Castellani (GRS’00), known for his 2019 novel Leading Men, is the Muse & the Marketplace founder and senior advisor, and Ida Rahim (CGS’19, CAS’21) is youth programs coordinator. Nearly 20 other alums are among GrubStreet’s 250 faculty, about 100 of whom teach in any given year.

They have a lot to do, including fulfilling GrubStreet’s diversity mission, made more urgent by the racial reckoning of recent years, while also fulfilling the promise of GrubStreet’s new home.

A New Chapter 

The writing center’s new home is a far cry from its namesake, the original Grub Street, which we described in 2015: “a seedy neighborhood of 18th-century London, peopled by hack writers and less-than respectable-publishers.’’

The venue, in a new 14-story condominium at 50 Liberty Drive, looks across the harbor at Logan Airport and is a short walk from waterfront neighbors like the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Offices, seminar rooms, a podcast studio, and lounge spaces are on the second floor, while the first is occupied by a satellite location of Porter Square Books and GrubStreet’s Fabulist café (just opened) and Writers’ Stage. The Writers’ Stage—used for programs and activities—is part of the bookstore during the day. At night, the bookshelves on wheels can be rolled out of the way for book launches, open mics, and other activities, and the event space comes alive.

“It’s just thrilling to me, sitting here, to think that GrubStreet started in a synagogue in Brookline with eight students and $400 on my credit card. That was the original investment,” Bridburg says. “And people believed and showed up. And then we had 60 people the next time, and it just kept growing. So, it’s really thrilling to be at this point where we have this street-level presence. It’s an exciting new chapter.”

It’s a big step up from GrubStreet’s cramped offices in various locations on Boylston Street by the Boston Common over the years. In 2018, GrubStreet was chosen through a city cultural initiative to get a reduced-price lease on the Seaport space, but it still had to raise $8 million for construction and startup costs. 

The lease was signed in 2019 and the move was already in the works when the pandemic hit. The majority of construction was finished in spring 2021, and limited in-person offerings resumed that fall amid the ongoing pandemic.

GrubStreet’s annual operating budget is more than $4 million, about half raised from foundations and other donors. In 2015, they moved to place inclusion at the center of their efforts. That meant they had to raise more contributed revenue in order to make investments in low-income communities and communities of color and to invest in curriculum development, fellowships, and scholarships. 

“What we didn’t know,” Bridburg says, “was whether people would step up and invest in our vision of creating a multicultural writing center in Boston, a hard place to do this work because of the terrible segregation here and the history of cultural inequity. But our community, including our donors, have really stepped up and been incredibly supportive of our work.”

The Seaport is widely seen as rich and white, and Bridburg and Suarez say GrubStreet will help diversify the area. 

Silver Lining to COVID Changes

Like most organizations, GrubStreet saw its routines disrupted by COVID-19 and moved its in-person classes online. But the pandemic had an unexpected benefit, bringing in lots of new participants from all over the country and even the world. Enrollment in classes and events topped 10,400 in 2021—up 32 percent from 2019. 

“From a diversity perspective, people now have folks in their classes from California and Texas, the Philippines, Egypt,” Bridburg says. “I was talking to a student the other night, and he was talking about how great it was to be in class with a woman from Manila, who was writing this interesting story featuring a pig—just something that came out of a completely different culture—and how that makes the class more interesting and special to him. So, we want to hold on to that.”

Online classes are also more accessible to people with disabilities, caregivers, and even people with kids. The online influx has given a boost to that very conscious effort to diversify GrubStreet.

“What we’re trying to figure out now is, what is the right in-person/online balance?” Bridburg says. “And what does hybrid look like for us? And in the GrubStreet way, we are going to experiment a whole lot and figure it out.”

“It isn’t just about bringing people in, ‘this is gonna step up our numbers.’ It’s about following through, even in the growth of our staff,” Suarez says. “The majority of the program staff is people of color. There’s a lot of diversity in-house, people who are directors and senior managers and leaders who grew up here, diversity that’s actually representative of the city of Boston.”

“Internally, we don’t commit to something if we don’t feel like it’s going to hit these goals. And we have the process in place. So if there’s a culture issue or, or we have some gaps, we have the systems to address it and to improve it, to listen to the community.”

Many GrubStreet faculty and some students are graduates of MFA writing programs. Even those who had good experiences know that the workshop system tends to favor certain kinds of writers and certain kinds of writing, Suarez says.

“It’s almost the standard that you aim for, iit was like you should be published in the New Yorker, this is what I need to aim for,” Suarez says. “But oftentimes, they don’t allow for that space in that exploration to really discover yourself as a writer in a way without having to fit a certain expectation.

“So here, with the expectations sort of removed, we have a variety and diversity of programs and classes and instructors where you can feel your way through and experiment,” he says. “Because of that, I think we are seeing that diversity of voices coming out and finding success.”