Members of The Writers’ Room are poets, novelists, journalists, graphic novelists, translators, librettists, playwrights, memoirists, and historians. We pride ourselves not just on our vibrant creative diversity, but on our cultural and socioeconomic diversity, too. Below is a sample of our current members:
Rosemary Booth is a native of New Jersey who lives in Cambridge, MA. She writes personal essays, poetry and criticism and has completed a series of essays on the intersection of writing and aging. Her essays, photo-essays, and poems have appeared in Under the Sun, The Oak, and, Epiphany Magazine, and the Imagination and Place 2010 anthology, Seasonings. Ms. Booth holds a B.S.Ed. from Fordham University, an M.A. in American Studies from Boston College, and a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Harvard University. She is a member of the International Women’s Writing Guild.
Robert Dall is a fiction writer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His short stories have been published in Hunger Mountain, the Evansville Review, the Blue Moon Review, Acorn Whistle, and the Beacon Street Review. He received his MFA from Emerson College, has completed two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and has been a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston since 2001 (and a board member since 2009). Currently, he is working on new pieces of short fiction while hoping to find a home for his novel In the Box, the dystopian tale of a New England fishing town that decides to mix 17th-century punishments with 21st-century media saturation.
Anne Gray Fischer, the administrator for the Room, was the 2011 Emerging Writer Fellow in nonfiction. Her book-in-progress, Bodies on the March: How Prostitutes Seized the Seventies, has received a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist grant, among other honors. She reviews books for Ploughshares online in a regular series, “Women in Trouble.” Anne is a doctoral student studying modern U.S. History at Brown University.
Dr. Lisa Gruenberg earned her MFA in Creative writing from Lesley University’s Low Residency Program in 2007 and joined the Writers’ Room of Boston in 2008. The author of short stories as well as a Holocaust memoir, Searching for Mia, Dr. Gruenberg received an honorable mention for the 2011 Glimmer Train Press “Family Matters” competition, a Joan Jakobson Scholarship to the 2011 Wesleyan Writers Conference, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant. Dr. Gruenberg works at Children’s Hospital Boston and teaches at Harvard Medical School. In 2010, she was named to the Fulbright Senior Consultant Roster for Global Health. Dr. Gruenberg provides volunteer medical service on the Eastern Cape of South Africa, in Rwanda, Bangladesh and Guatemala.
Tom Lakin holds a B.A. in English from Bowdoin College and a Masters in Journalism from Boston University. He currently works as a freelance sports writer for ESPN. In his time with ESPN, he has covered the Celtics, the Patriots, the PGA Tour, BC football, Harvard-Yale, the Boston Marathon, the Head of the Charles, and even NASCAR. He hopes to use his time at the Room to sharpen and expand his craft, with an eye toward branching into fiction.
Amy Marcott has published fiction in Necessary Fiction, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, Dogwood, Memorious, Juked, and elsewhere. She has earned fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Somerville Arts Council as well as a scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won third place in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Contest, among other honors. She received a BA in English from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Penn State. She currently writes and edits for MIT’s Alumni Association, teaches at Grub Street, and is at work on a novel.
Memory Blake Peebles left her hometown in north Alabama to attend Middlebury College. She was a William Hunter Sharpe fellow in creative writing at The University of Edinburgh and a Henry Hoyns fellow at the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in fiction. At UVA, she also served as the fiction editor of Meridian. Her membership began in the fall of 2010, and her first published story, conceived and written in the cubicles of the WROB, is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review. She is currently at work on a novel.
While writing fiction at Bennington College, Lisa Perkins studied the Romantic poets and went on to earn a PhD in British literature from the University of Chicago. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly, Quiddity, The Fourth River, Under the Sun, Front Range Review and Dislocate. Lisa was the semi-finalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition, and she is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. Lisa is also the writer, producer, and director of a film, Secret Intelligence: Decoding Hedy Lamarr, now in post-production. She is currently working on a novel.
Shuchi Saraswat received her MFA from Emerson College, where she primarily worked on a novel. Excerpts of her novel have helped her receive scholarships to Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships to Writers Omi at Ledig House and The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her short fiction has appeared in Quick Fiction.
