In two weeks, I will attend my third AWP conference, this time in Los Angeles. I was spoiled last year by the choice of a very inexpensive Midwestern city within driving distance of home; this year it will set me back more than my rent. Gulp.
But this is my first year as a presenter at AWP, which is quite an honor. I am part of the Adjunct Writer Caucus, focusing our event on how to balance an adjunct professor’s life with your own writing. I hope my fellow panelists are managing it better than I am.
And then I look at the other panels offered during the four-day conference, because as usual there are at least ten PER HOUR that I could happily attend. Among the contenders:
- They Only Call It Class War When We Fight Back
- AI-Proofing the Creative Writing Classroom
- Big and Bodied: Writing Against Fatphobia
- Alternative Funding for Literary Magazines and Small Presses
- Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges
- The Art of the Uncanny
- Leaving the Writing Cave: When, Why and How to Pursue Representation
- The Vitual Workshop: Tips for Teaching Creative Writing Online
- Holy F*ck: Women, Faith and Sex in Fiction
- Literary Production During Authoritarian Governments
- Scripting Into the Apocalypse: How Screenwriters Create for Global Change
- The High-Wire Act of a Novel’s First Pages
- Older and Wiser or Older and Invisible?
- Exploring Notions of Home, Migration and Return
- Podcast Guesting: How to Get Booked and Be a Great Guest
- Cronedom: Wisdom and Wit of Women With Purpose
- Financial Literacy and the Material Realities of Being a Writer (gulp)
- This Beautiful Body: Writing Into Illness
- Book Tours: Wisdom and Warning From Those Who’ve Gone Before
- The Southern Lit Journal as Resistance
- Getting Out of Our Own Way: Cultivating a Sustainable Writing Practice
- Women Writers Talk Shame in Academia and Their Writing Lives
- Do the Hustle: How to Publicize Your Book
- The Ghosts That Haunt Us
- Criminalized Lit
- Scene Work Makes Dream Work
- Feeling FATastic: Poetics of Pleasure, Sexuality and Liberation
- For the Love of the Novella
- “I am Still a Body in the World”: Disability and Chronic Illness in Poetry
- Sounding All Voices: Creative Writing in the Developmental English Classroom
- The Comeback of the Short Story Collection
- How to Pitch Like Hollywood
- Teaching Speculative Fiction
- We Beautifully Outside: Informal Writing Collectives
- Authors Guild presents on writing and publishing in the AI era
These are the smallest fraction of the hundreds of panels at AWP, and that’s besides the keynote by Roxane Gay. I may be a little gobsmacked to meet her, but meet her I shall.
I am very excited to return to the writer-geek prom, and if you’re going to be at AWP, please let me know and we’ll meet up! As is my habit, I will post roundups on Patreon, and I will try to do some photos and TikToks as well. It’s been a long time since I was back in Lost Angels, but it’s one of my favorite places, stuffed full of nostalgia from all my childhood visits to my family. And even though I can’t possibly work in a visit to Disneyland in an anniversary year – dammit – I’ll wave hi to the castle as the Uber passes.