Nonfiction Writing Program Alumna Helen Betya Rubinstein (MFA '15) will read from her new book, Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power, in conversation with English Associate Professor Bennett Sims, at Prairie Lights Books.
From a viral indictment of copyediting to a widely taught essay on reimagining the writing workshop, Rubinstein's iconoclastic takes reliably instigate controversy and conversation. Feels Like Trouble builds on these provocations, drawing on experiences in creative writing programs, one-on-one coaching sessions, and publishers' meeting rooms to ask how we might reorient our practices away from harm. Whether speculating on the relationship between "good grammar" and "good taste," casting a critical eye on the ubiquitous "compliment sandwich," or demonstrating how the shared experience of an MFA program reverberates differently across twelve classmates' lives, these playful and useful essays will challenge readers' assumptions about what "good writing" means, and reinvigorate any writer, teacher, or editor's practice.
About Helen Betya Rubinstein
Helen Betya Rubinstein is a writer, writing teacher, and coach. Her book Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power is forthcoming from the University of New Orleans Press in October 2026. A second book, The Case Against Rubinstein: An Anti-Fiction, will follow in 2027. Her booklet of lyric fictions, Because Sex Is a Story & Sex Is a Song, is currently available.
Her essays and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and frequently in Literary Hub and Jewish Currents, where she is a contributing writer. She holds MFA degrees from Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Yaddo, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, among others, in support of several books-in-progress. Rubinstein was a 2023-24 GIDEST Fellow at The New School and will be a fellow at Hawthornden Brooklyn in 2026.