What is AWP & Can It Help Your Writing Career?

Association of Writers & Writing Programs may or may not be for you

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Hi Everyone,

Real life makes it increasingly difficult to focus on ordinary business. Some days it feels as if normalcy is just a temporary pretense. But capitulating to doom is not an option. So between calling my representatives and writing postcards to help WI Judge Susan Crawford defeat Musk’s hand-picked fascist on the WI Supreme Court (which will likely decide the balance of power in Congress next year), I’m trying to take care of my writing business.

To that end, I’m putting the finishing touches on event outlines for two panels that I’m moderating at this year’s AWP conference, March 26-29 in Los Angeles. One’s on Ghostwriting, the other on Writing from Family Secrets, and both promise to be grand, but as I was fishing around the guidelines, I recalled how baffled I was about AWP the first time I went, back in 2006, and I thought some of you might be equally bemused by this corner of the MFA world.

Anyone can attend the conference, and every serious writer could, theoretically, benefit. But AWP is definitely of more interest to some writers than others. So here’s my take on this fixture of MFA life.

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A brief announcement for paid subscribers!

• Starting today, I’m going to end each weekend MFA Lore post with a prompt for paid subscribers. Some prompts will be generative — to inspire fresh, new writing. Others, maybe more, will be editorial — to suggest fresh ways to revise your current work. [Today’s editorial prompt involves the use of a “color lens.”]

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To AWP or not to AWP?

The first time I attended AWP—the annual writers’ conference hosted by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, I was in my final semester of Bennington’s MFA program. As an MFA student, I’d automatically been receiving the AWP publication The Writer’s Chronicle every few months, and I appreciated its articles about craft, pedagogy, and literary writers —and the job listings, which would eventually lead me to my faculty position at Goddard. But I was mistaken in thinking the AWP conference would help me find a teaching gig. It’s not at all the career fair for MFA grads that I’d imagined.

AWP that year was held in Austin, Texas, in the same convention center venue used by South-by-Southwest— the posters for SXSW were still everywhere, and so were some of the musicians. But I understood the purpose of SXSW, a mecca for artists who hoped to be discovered and producers who hoped to discover and sign talent. AWP was entirely different, but I could not for the life of me figure out what it actually was.

I’d been to BEA, the giant book trade show held annually until COVID “retired” it, where major publishers displayed their forthcoming titles and major authors promoted their forthcoming titles and booksellers from across the country placed their forthcoming sales orders. Similar trade shows are held in London, Frankfurt, and other cities around the world. Business gets done at these conferences.

In Austin I wandered around a giant “bookfair” consisting of rows and rows of tables of literary magazines or brochures for graduate or undergrad writing programs. There were also a few small presses selling books, but no one seemed to be conducting much serious business. Most of the attendees were, like me, already enrolled in writing programs. None of the people representing those programs seemed interested in job applicants. And despite the enthusiasm of the lit mag editors to promote their publications, few attendees subscribed or purchased copies. There seemed to be little commerce at AWP. What was it then?

I sampled some of the events being held upstairs in the conference rooms. There panels of writers, teachers, students, editors, agents, and publishers conversed about everything from undergrad curricula to the structure of novellas, from the recognition of sci-fi as speculative literature to gender and racial inequities in the publishing industry. There were readings by prominent poets and novelists and onstage conversations with bestselling authors. And between these official events there were all sorts of off-site readings and parties for alumni of the various programs and publications.

It finally dawned on me why people attended AWP after I attended a panel featuring Sabina Murray, whose collection The Caprices had bowled me over and would later provide vital inspiration for my fourth novel, Glorious Boy. Hearing Murray talk about the publication of her book was thrilling enough, but an hour later I bumped into her at the restaurant where we both were having lunch. We chatted briefly, more or less as peers, because it was a given that we both were writers.

Everyone at AWP is a writer. And that’s the point. It’s one big fiesta of writers. Meeting literary friends and heroes isn’t just a benefit of going; it’s the reason we go.

Is it worth it to attend?