The next Craft on Draft event is coming up on Thurs 5/21 at 7pm at Trident Booksellers & Cafe (338 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02115), featuring Annie Hartnett, Juliet Faithfull, Emily Ross, and moderated by Kelly J. Ford.
You can sign up for this free event here! Full event description below:
Join our expert panel as they discuss how they handle creating characters that come alive on the page and in a reader’s heart. Featuring Annie Hartnett, Juliet Faithfull, Emily Ross, and moderated by Kelly J. Ford, the conversation will delve into craft elements such as voice, backstory, motivation, and compelling arcs, offering insight into the skin and bones of memorable protagonists and antagonists.
Get in on the action! Bring a printed paragraph of your own writing in which you introduce a character for the first time. A few lucky audience members will have their entry read aloud anonymously and discussed by our authors.
Free and open to the public, come mingle with new and seasoned writers!
Craft on Draft is a reading series created and managed by alumni of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program and devoted to great fiction—and the mechanics behind it. Grab a drink—and your writing—and imbibe the wisdom of published authors.
Seating begins at 6:30pm. All books and cafe items will be available for purchase.
Panelists:
Annie Hartnett, The Road to Tender Hearts
Annie Hartnett is the award-winning author of three novels: Rabbit Cake, Unlikely Animals, and the national bestseller The Road to Tender Hearts, which won the 2025 New England Book Award for fiction and was named a best book of 2025 from NPR, LitHub, and Southern Living. Annie has been awarded fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Associates of the Boston Public Library. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, she co-runs Accountability Workshops for writers, helping writers commit to routines and embrace the long, slow, joyful, terrible process of doing the work. She lives in Massachusetts with her pretty good husband, perfect daughter, and two flawless rescue dogs, Willie Nelson and Minnie Mouse.
Juliet Faithfull, Liar’s Dice
Juliet Faithfull is a Spanish-British-American writer who grew up in Brazil. LIAR’S DICE, her first novel, was a winner of the Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She was awarded a Pauline Scheer Fellowship by GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program and her short stories have been published in the Bellevue Revue and Urbanus Magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and Smith College School of Social Work, Juliet works as a trilingual psychotherapist and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her two sons.
Emily Ross, Swallowtail
Emily Ross is the author of the mystery thriller SWALLOWTAIL and the International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist, HALF IN LOVE WITH DEATH. She won the Al Blanchard best story award for her short story, “Let the Chips Fall”, which appeared in Devil’s Snare: Best New England Crime stories 2024. She is a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator and lives in Quincy, MA, with her husband and Obi-Wan Kenobi, their very playful cat.
Moderated by:
Kelly J. Ford, The Hunt
Kelly J. Ford is the Anthony-nominated author of Real Bad Things, Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017, and The Hunt. An Arkansas native, Kelly writes crime fiction set in the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley.
Register here!
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