Association of Writers & Writing Programs

Based on Wikipedia: Association of Writers & Writing Programs

The Largest Gathering of Writers You've Never Heard Of

Every late winter, something remarkable happens. Twelve thousand writers descend on a single American city. They flood hotel lobbies, pack convention halls, and queue for hours just to hear other writers talk about sentences. They haul rolling suitcases stuffed with chapbooks and literary magazines. They drink too much at receptions and swap business cards that list "poet" as a job title.

This is the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, known universally as AWP.

If you're not a writer, you've probably never heard of it. But if you've ever taken a creative writing class in college, read a literary magazine, or wondered how contemporary American literature actually gets made—the answer involves AWP more than you might imagine.

A Brief History of Writers in the Academy

For most of human history, writers learned their craft the old-fashioned way: by reading voraciously, writing badly for years, and eventually—if they were lucky—finding mentors or literary circles that sharpened their work. The idea that you could go to school to become a writer would have struck Shakespeare as absurd. Dickens would have laughed. Even Hemingway, who famously said all a writer needs is a room and a wastebasket, would have been skeptical.

But in 1936, something changed.

The University of Iowa launched the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the first graduate program in creative writing in the United States. The premise was radical for its time: that the creation of literature was as worthy of academic study as the analysis of it. That a novelist deserved a place on the faculty alongside the professor lecturing about novels.

The experiment worked. By the 1960s, creative writing programs were sprouting across American universities. And in 1967, fifteen writers representing thirteen of these programs gathered to form what would become AWP.

The founding was modest. R. V. Cassill, a novelist and short story writer, joined with George Garrett, a poet and fiction writer, to organize the initial meeting. Their concerns were practical: How should these new programs be structured? What standards should they maintain? How could writers in academia support one another?

They called it the Associated Writing Programs—a bureaucratic name for an organization that would eventually represent nearly fifty thousand individual writers and five hundred college creative writing programs across North America.

What AWP Actually Does

Think of AWP as three things simultaneously: a professional association, a publishing hub, and an annual festival.

As a professional association, AWP advocates for writers in higher education. This matters more than it might seem. Unlike professors of physics or history, creative writing faculty don't have standardized credentials. There's no board certification for poets. AWP helps establish what a quality writing program looks like, what resources students should expect, and what career paths exist for graduates.

As a publishing hub, AWP connects writers with the sprawling ecosystem of literary magazines and small presses that publish most serious contemporary literature. The organization maintains extensive databases of grants, awards, and publication opportunities. It runs six annual contests, including prizes for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, with winners receiving cash awards and book publication through university presses.

But it's the annual conference that gives AWP its cultural weight.

The Conference: A Literary Woodstock

The first AWP conference happened in 1973 at the Library of Congress. Six events. Sixteen presenters. Among them were some genuine literary luminaries—Ralph Ellison, who had written Invisible Man, and Wallace Stegner, whose writing program at Stanford would become legendary. But it was a small affair, almost intimate.

Compare that to today's gathering: over twelve thousand attendees, eight hundred exhibitors, and more than five hundred events packed into three or four days. The scale is genuinely staggering.

The bookfair alone sprawls across a convention center floor the size of several football fields. Small presses stack tables with their latest titles. Literary magazines fan out sample issues. University programs recruit prospective students. For many independent publishers, this is their most important sales event of the year—a chance to put physical books into the hands of the people most likely to read, review, and teach them.

The programming runs continuously in dozens of simultaneous rooms. Panel discussions on craft ("The Architecture of the Sentence"). Readings by prize-winning authors. Lectures on the business of writing. Workshops on teaching. Debates about politics and art. Networking events for specific communities—poets of color, disabled writers, veterans, LGBTQ authors.

The list of past speakers reads like a syllabus for a course on contemporary literature. Margaret Atwood. Don DeLillo. Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel laureate. Toni Morrison appeared before her death. So did Ursula K. Le Guin. In recent years: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colson Whitehead, Roxane Gay, Ocean Vuong.

For three days, writers exist in a world where their obsessions are normal. Where debating the merits of the Oxford comma is acceptable party conversation. Where everyone has opinions about semicolons.

The Writer's Chronicle and the Literary Ecosystem

Between conferences, AWP publishes The Writer's Chronicle, a magazine that appears six times a year. This isn't a literary magazine in the traditional sense—it doesn't publish poems or short stories. Instead, it publishes essays about the craft and culture of writing.

These essays matter because they represent writers thinking seriously about what they do. How does a novelist structure time? What's the relationship between poetry and music? How do you write about trauma without exploiting it? The conversations are inside baseball for the literary world, but they also offer a window into how contemporary writers think about their art.

AWP also runs several prize competitions that launch careers. The most notable is the AWP Award Series, which each year selects winning manuscripts in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for publication by university presses. For an unknown writer, winning one of these contests can be transformative—it means a book with national distribution and the credibility that comes from a competitive selection process.

The prizes carry the names of notable writers. The Donald Hall Prize for Poetry honors a former U.S. Poet Laureate known for his essays on poetic craft. The Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction commemorates a writer whose work was fierce, political, and formally innovative. The James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel—renamed in 2023—honors the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Growth of the MFA

AWP's expansion mirrors something larger: the explosive growth of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing as an American institution.

In 1975, there were perhaps fifty MFA programs in the country. Today, there are well over two hundred. Every year, thousands of aspiring writers enter these programs, spending two or three years studying poetry or fiction or creative nonfiction in an academic setting.

This growth is controversial. Critics argue that MFA programs produce homogeneous, workshopped prose—competent but safe, technically accomplished but lacking the wildness that great literature requires. They point out that the expansion has created an oversupply of credentialed writers competing for a shrinking number of academic jobs. They question whether writing can really be taught, or whether the whole enterprise is an expensive way to delay adulthood while calling it professional development.

Defenders counter that MFA programs provide something invaluable: time. Two years to read deeply, to fail at ambitious projects, to find your voice without the pressure of immediate commercial success. They note that many of the most celebrated contemporary writers—from Michael Chabon to Jhumpa Lahiri—passed through these programs. And they argue that the democratization of literary education has opened doors for writers who would never have found mentorship through the old systems of patronage and social connection.

AWP doesn't take sides in this debate, but its existence depends on the outcome. If MFA programs contracted, AWP would shrink accordingly. The organization's growth from sixteen presenters in 1973 to twelve thousand attendees today tracks almost perfectly with the rise of academic creative writing.

Controversies and Growing Pains

Any organization this size eventually generates controversy. AWP has had its share.

In 2016, the organization removed poet and conceptual artist Vanessa Place from a conference subcommittee after backlash over one of her art projects. Place had been tweeting the complete text of Gone with the Wind, the 1936 novel set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, as a way of highlighting its racist content. The project was intentionally provocative—the question was whether it critiqued racism or participated in it. AWP, facing pressure from members, chose not to associate with the controversy.

The decision illustrated a tension that runs through literary communities: between provocation as artistic strategy and harm as lived experience. Conceptual art often works by making audiences uncomfortable. But when the discomfort falls disproportionately on marginalized groups, the calculation becomes more complex.

That same year, AWP faced criticism for its handling of disability access. Members charged that the subcommittee selecting conference events had rejected all proposals related to disability and literature. The organization disputed the specific claim—noting that the Deaf and Disabled Writers Caucus was a networking event, not a panel—but implemented changes nonetheless. Reserved seating. Improved signage. An onsite location for reporting accessibility issues. American Sign Language interpretation. Real-time captioning. Braille programs.

By 2017, twenty panels on disability and literature made it into the conference program. The rapid response suggested that AWP, for all its institutional bulk, could adapt when pushed.

The Economics of Literary Culture

AWP exists at the intersection of art and commerce, idealism and practicality. Understanding it requires understanding how literary culture actually sustains itself in America.

The commercial publishing industry—the New York houses whose books fill airport bookstores—publishes relatively little literary fiction and even less poetry. The margins are thin, the sales are modest, and the marketing budgets are negligible compared to thrillers or celebrity memoirs. Most contemporary literary writing finds its first home elsewhere: in small presses, university presses, and the hundreds of literary magazines published by universities and nonprofit organizations.

This ecosystem depends heavily on institutional support. Universities subsidize literary magazines with office space and stipends for student editors. Creative writing programs provide jobs for writers who would struggle to support themselves through book sales alone. Foundations offer grants. The National Endowment for the Arts—which helped fund AWP's first conference—provides crucial support.

AWP sits at the center of this web. The annual conference is, among other things, a marketplace. Small presses meet booksellers. Literary magazines recruit subscribers. Writers pitch agents. The bookfair generates more sales in three days than many independent publishers see in months.

The organization's membership fees have, in its own telling, "grown exponentially since their inception." This reflects both the growth in creative writing programs and the professionalization of literary culture. AWP provides legitimacy—a sense that writing is a real profession with real institutional structures, not just a romantic calling pursued by isolated individuals in garrets.

Choosing Your People

The Substack article that prompted this exploration is titled "Choose Your People Carefully: Who You Walk Beside Will Shape Your Life and Your Art." The title captures something essential about AWP's appeal.

Writing is famously solitary. The work happens alone, in silence, often in states of doubt or despair. But writers, like everyone else, need community. They need readers who understand what they're trying to do. They need fellow practitioners who speak the same language. They need the encouragement that comes from knowing others are engaged in the same struggle.

AWP provides this community at scale. For three days each year, writers who spend most of their time in isolation gather with others who share their obsessions. The conversations in hotel lobbies may be more valuable than the official programming. The friends made over drinks may become lifelong correspondents and collaborators.

This is what professional associations do: they create belonging. They tell their members that their work matters, that they're part of something larger than themselves, that the obscure craft they've devoted their lives to has a place in the world.

The Future of Writers Gathering

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted AWP like it disrupted everything else. The 2020 and 2021 conferences were canceled or moved online. Writers who had built their professional lives around the annual gathering suddenly had to find other ways to connect.

The return to in-person events—the 2023 conference in Seattle drew over nine thousand attendees—suggested that the appetite for physical gathering remained strong. Virtual panels couldn't replicate the energy of the bookfair floor, the serendipity of running into old friends, the physical presence of so many books in one place.

But the disruption raised questions. Does literary culture need a single massive annual gathering, or would smaller, more frequent events serve writers better? As publishing continues to fragment and diversify, will a single organization be able to represent the full range of contemporary writing? How will AWP adapt to a literary landscape that looks increasingly different from the academic creative writing world that birthed it?

These questions don't have clear answers. What's clear is that AWP has become something its fifteen founders in 1967 could never have imagined: a major institution in American literary life, representing tens of thousands of writers and shaping how literature gets taught, published, and discussed.

Whether you've heard of it or not, if you read contemporary American literature, you've been touched by its influence. The writer whose book you admired probably attended a program in AWP's directory. The small press that published it probably exhibited at the bookfair. The literary magazine that first published that writer's work probably received guidance from AWP's resources.

This is how literary culture reproduces itself—not through individual genius alone, but through institutions that connect, support, and sustain the people who make it.