May 1987 
The Writer as Midwife
Daniel Halpern
Our panel today wishes to address the topic of Writer as Midwife. Writers whose other work is to help others in their work as writers. Other being, as I understand our topic, one part of our subject, our feelings about this particular generosity, the other. Most writers must earn a living of some kind beyond "modest advance" and "per-page honorarium" which the matt and non-commercial among us make. And so a number of us have chosen the contiguous fields of editing and teaching and administrating.
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Rita Dove and the Pulitzer Prize
AWP Editor
Rita Dove is not answering the phone today. Her machine screens a barrage of incoming calls. This is certainly a surprise. To her students, Rita is the energetic teacher with the tri-color fingernails and a patient smile. To the board members of the Associated Writing Programs, she is the delicate negotiator who delivered them through three days of rough and tumble meetings. But today, the day after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove is a poet in search of solitude.
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Credentials and Critics
Eric Torgersen
Since 1960 or so, American poetry has developed a new infrastructure: not only the still-growing numbers of undergraduate writing courses and graduate writing programs, but organizations and support groups serving poetry in all kinds of ways. There are the National Endowment and the state arts councils, with their grants and programs like Poets in the Schools; there are AWP and CCLM; there are Poets and Writers and the Teachers and Writers Collaborative; there certainly appear to be more presses, colonies, conferences, prizes and fellowships than ever.
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Ambition and the M.F.A. Magazine
James Brock
I'm somewhat confounded by the sudden explosion of literary magazines founded by creative writing programs for their M.F.A. students to edit, especially confounded since I am presently the editor of Indiana Review, a literary magazine associated with Indiana University and run by M.F.A. students. What I am certain of is that the place and importance of M.F.A. magazines have not been seriously questioned.
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