It’s that time of year when I receive a barrage of emails and questions from well-meaning friends asking if I will be at AWP, the annual conference held by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. As a writer, publisher of a literary journal, and independent workshop leader, I understand why people assume I would attend AWP. So I’d like to collect in one convenient place all of the reasons why I don’t go to AWP. My reasons range from the very personal to the global. I don’t currently advocate for a boycott of AWP, although this has less to do with the organization itself and more about how we claim personal and political agency as artists with the organizations we align ourselves with. These reasons should be read strictly as my own and not as a larger call to divest from AWP, even though at times the language I use may sound similar to this. Whether or not others decide to take up some of these reasons as their own is not up to me, though I do welcome company.
Also, these are absolutely not listed in order of importance.
Reason #1: I’ve never been to AWP and I don’t want to break that streak. Also, I’m quite happy with how my writing “career” has been going outside of the institutional structures that AWP upholds, so I don’t really know why I would go. (I don't really participate in or aspire to the careerism advocated by AWP, but that's a post for another time.) My editor said to me recently that my “brand” is built on sincerity (ick), but there is a part of me that feels like if I capitulated now and attended AWP I’d be turning my back on my own refusenik* tendency. I’m generally more interested in seeing where the road less trodden leads than following the crowd.
Reason #2: Speaking of crowds, I don’t like them. Conference halls are loud and echoey and I experience an instant spike in anxiety as soon as I set foot inside them (when they’re full of people, that is—empty of people I find conference halls to be quiet, fascinating places that could be better used as housing or free third spaces—see Reason #5) I have a hard time hearing what someone is saying to me in a conference hall unless I’m staring intently at their mouth. I much prefer interacting with people in small groups of less than ten people or one-on-one. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy attending or giving public readings—I do enjoy those, as I feel they come with a singularity of attention that is difficult to come by at a large conference with multiple events happening at once over several days.
Reason #3: I am a Virgo who is good at holding grudges. I remember when AWP forged ahead with their in-person conference in San Antonio in March of 2020, despite the rapidly spreading coronavirus and the example of other professional conferences canceling their events. They did not provide registration refunds to those who did cancel, regardless of whether they were immunocompromised or not. Similarly, I remember in 2024 the concern from the LGBTQ+ community about attending AWP in Kansas City, Missouri on the heels of widely publicized anti-trans legislation in that state. I know there were some who saw AWP as a sort of lifeline in Kansas City in that time, or at least I heard from several Kansas City residents who didn’t want AWP to pull out of KC in response, but also some who did. I’d be interested in a post-mortem from trans KC writers, especially in light of the fact that according to the Trans Legislation Tracker there are 50 anti-trans bills under consideration in Missouri right now, making it second in anti-trans legislation in the country behind only Oklahoma. AWP’s statement made a big deal of the fact that they were in close contact with Missouri’s first openly gay senator Greg Ranzer about the issue. It also included the following statement:
“The Kansas City Convention Center has been scheduled as our venue since 2015 and was rescheduled from 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is financially and legally impossible for us to cancel, move, or postpone the conference out of Kansas City. To do so would put AWP in financial peril, meaning we would be unable to support future conferences and year-round writing resources to members in the way they have come to expect and value.”
i.e. “we got a conference to run you crazy queers, your safety is not more important than our solvency, so shut up!”
Reason #4: AWP is cringe. The History page on the AWP website features a carousel of black and white photos from AWPs of old. The implication is clear: If you’d been at AWP in '89, you could have seen Allen Ginsburg on stage. You could have boogied down with Adrienne Rich and June Jordan in 1984! But it’s not 1984, it’s 2026, and a few things have changed, not just about AWP but about the climate in which it finds itself. One could argue in response to Reason #3 that it’s not AWP’s responsibility to respond to or advocate for change in our culture, but . . . it’s ostensibly the largest gathering of writers in the United States year after year . . . if this group does not feel some collective mission to find a forceful voice, interrupt business as usual and push back against rising conservatism, fascism, racism, white supremacy, transphobia, and Zionism; if instead the main concern is how to remain profitable and make the most money and provide a venue for writers to sell their books and reproduce the JD Vance trajectory, then I think we’re well and truly fucked.
Reason #5: Olympics syndrome. No one is out here (yet) in the streets protesting AWP’s arrival in a new city like they have been in the host cities for the Olympics for decades now. But the entire model of the academic conference applied to creative writing strikes me as wasteful at best, and flattening of the very real and impactful political differences between the large and small organizations who attend. AWP routinely draws 8,000-12,000 writers to a city, each of whom racks up thousands of miles and emissions in travel and hotel stays. With today’s connectivity online, there’s no reason for such massively polluting events to happen year after year, without even a little bit of guilt. Personally, because I moved to live on the west coast of the U.S. eight years ago and my parents still live on the east coast, I fly back and forth more than I would like, and so I try to be conscious and wary of taking on added unnecessary travel. Add to this the amount of space taken up by large convention centers often built on the razed leftovers of poorer neighborhoods, centers that are often empty and, in Portland at least, taunt the unhoused with their airconditioning in the summers.
Reason #6: I’m against the idea that a writer needs to literally pay their dues to a large membership organization like AWP. I’ve written about this before when it comes to literary submission platform Submittable and reading fees, and I feel the same way about AWP. Registration fees vary widely—from a $70 student rate for those enrolled in MFA programs that have an institutional membership, all the way up to a $1,000 price tag for a presenter booth for publishers and other organizations. You’re paying for exposure to both a high concentration of readers in one physical space, and also a high concentration of events and lectures, and I guess the synchronicity of being in the same place as a bunch of moderately famous writers at the same time. There’s nothing stopping people from organizing their own readings and lectures for free—certainly, AWP doesn’t pay your average presenter (though I'm sure headliners or keynotes receive ample compensation) and you still have to pay a $110 registration fee even if you are a presenter or reader at an official conference event. Most people I know go explicitly for the off-site events only: unofficial readings and panels held at bars or other venues around the city at the same time as the conference.
Back when I was a student, I couldn’t afford plane fare and hotel fees to make it to AWP, and now that I can, I can’t really see the point. My default response has been, ‘It’s just not for me.’ While this is still technically true, it doesn’t get at all the reasons why it’s not for me, and the larger ways it justifies and reinforces the role of big money in the arts. But that’s a longer post for another time.
*I use this word not as an erasure of the specific history it references of Soviet Jews who were refused permission from the USSR to emigrate until 1971, but as a conscious continuance of the descriptive capacity of the word as it has migrated to English and other languages as someone who refuses to do something out of political conviction, such as the Israeli refuseniks who continue to be imprisoned for refusing to serve in the IDF due to its role in perpetuating genocide, ethnic cleansing, settler violence and seizure of Palestinian land.
*Still hoping to get back and complete this trifecta of columns. The publishing and cultural landscape has just been moving so fast these last 2 years, and my alignments and thinking have continued to shift. I probably just need to accept that they’ll never stop changing and just write them anyway, but I feel a responsibility to articulate at least a semi-coherent and sustainable theory of publishing.