The Writer's Notebook

Articles on publishing, teaching, career advice, current literary affairs, and more. In short, a blog about everything in your notebook.

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AWP’s Online Resources for Writers

AWP | April 2021

AWP has compiled a list of some of our online resources you might find useful. We also look forward to hearing from you about your experiences working online.
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Writing and Mentorship During the Pandemic

Ellen Kazimer & Lisa C. Taylor | December 2020

Ellen Kazimer and Lisa C. Taylor reflect on their W2W participation in the midst of a pandemic.
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The Path Forward

Nicole Kuruszko | December 2020

W2W mentee Nicole Kuruszko reflects on her mentorship under Jennifer Steil.
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More Colors in My Rainbow Bookshelf

Kate McDevitt | June 2020

I identified as a reader long before I realized I fell under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. One of the things I do every year to celebrate pride month is exclusively LGBTQ+ books.
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Breathing to Write

Jennifer Sinor | April 2020

We must teach the whole person. To deny students their complete identity as human beings is to sever them at the neck.
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From Disaster to Hope: Leza Lowitz’s Up from the Sea and the Art of Novels-In-Verse

Meg Eden | April 2020

With my just-released poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World, I wanted to return to the central event of these poems—the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima Powerplant disaster—reflecting on this tragedy with new eyes.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Melissa Faliveno

AWP | February 2020

I’m looking forward to exploring the city. Whenever I’m in a new place I take some time to scope out the independent and used/antiquarian bookstores, so I’ll definitely be doing that, and might try to catch some music.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Octavio Quintanilla

AWP | February 2020

The first time I attended AWP was in Los Angeles. The thing I remember most has to be the human buzz, the excitement, the anticipation to hear some of my favorite writers present and read their work.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Donika Kelly

AWP | February 2020

Every AWP, I look forward to getting hugs from my friends who I haven’t seen because we live in different places. The hugs are the best.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jean Kwok

AWP | February 2020

Author friends told me that AWP was THE conference to attend in order to connect, so I tried it.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Carrie Fountain

AWP | February 2020

The area around the library—the Southwest School of the Arts, etc.—is just lovely.
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25 Tips for AWP Success

Paulette Perhach | February 2020

Like the life of being a writer itself, AWP is fun, fulfilling, and terrifying. What brings me there every year is that it’s the largest gathering of writers in the country, which is the exact thing that also makes me want to run for my life every time I first open the door.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Eileen Cronin

AWP | February 2020

I try to support panels where a friend is participating, especially writers who have historically been cut out of literature, and that seems to me to be the disabled writers at this point.
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Two Writers Walk into an Elevator

Paulette Perhach | February 2020

I didn’t decide to go to AWP with my poet friend Michelle until my FOMO spiked just a few weeks out, and by then the hotels were booked. This was the LA year.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with James Tate Hill

AWP | February 2020

Although I read digitally and through audio, I always look forward to the Bookfair for an opportunity to chat with editors of presses and journals.
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Interview with David Laidacker-Luna, President, Fiesta Youth

Ely Vance | February 2020

I became involved with Fiesta Youth as a volunteer over 4 years ago and have been involved ever since. It was something I knew right away that I wanted to be a part of.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Alice McDermott

AWP | February 2020

My advice to first-timers is take it easy, don't try to do everything, and if you see an old friend, teacher, writing buddy, always remind them of your name and place.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Deborah Paredez

AWP | February 2020

I'm a San Antonio native, and March is a beautiful time to visit. I would recommend taking in some art at the Presa House Gallery and hiking the Mission Trail and having a drink at the legendary Esquire Bar.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Julian Randall

AWP | February 2020

The CantoMundo 10-year reading. That one is going to be flames, and I highly recommend it!
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Willie Perdomo

AWP | February 2020

I'm definitely looking forward to Helena María Viramontes' keynote. I'm also excited about launching LatiNext, which is the new volume in the BreakBeat Poets anthology series out of Haymarket Books.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Elizabeth Acevedo

AWP | February 2020

Listening to Patricia Smith read had a lasting impact; she is legendary and it felt clear in the way the entire room seemed to be on the edge of their seats, craning forward, that she was casting a spell on all of us.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jake Skeets

AWP | February 2020

I think it’s important to honor the writers who have paved the way for Native & Indigenous literature to exist within the national market and consciousness.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Mahogany L. Browne

AWP | February 2020

I'm always excited to see what new ways the writers and educators are sharing their work and processes.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Katharine Coles

AWP | February 2020

The times that give me the warmest feelings involve drinking wine and eating great food with my old friends from graduate school and newer friends who have grown close along the way.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Norma E. Cantú

AWP | January 2020

I am looking forward to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Keynote and to the sessions with Latinx writers like my buddies from Kansas City!
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Liliana Valenzuela

AWP | January 2020

It’s ginormous! Focus on a few authors and panels and go from there.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Kristen Young

AWP | January 2020

Though I’ve often preferred to travel alone, I was glad to have a buddy during my first AWP. I feel renewed by even brief meetups for coffee, and it’s nice to have someone to sit with between panels. Later in the evening, nothing saves a hotel bar like a familiar face.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Monique Truong

AWP | January 2020

In West Mills by De'Shawn Charles Winslow: a debut novel that introduces us to an unforgettable small town in North Carolina and a cast of characters who are remarkably fully formed, each one charming and flawed and carrying within them the weight of history.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with TC Tolbert

AWP | January 2020

I’m a student at heart so I love going to the panels where I take copious notes and geek out.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Aimee Liu

AWP | January 2020

There’s almost too much to choose from! This year I’m excited to be part of the Red Hen Press family at the Bookfair, and I always look forward to the keynote and to the AWP reunion of alumni and faculty from the Goddard College MFA Program where I teach.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Ada Calhoun

AWP | January 2020

I met the Solid State Bookstore guys at an AWP panel a couple of years ago and when I was on my last book tour they took me to a Nationals game. I'm hoping to parlay this AWP into more baseball games nationwide.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Ellen Meeropol

AWP | January 2020

My publisher, Red Hen Press, always has a big booth at the Bookfair and I love hanging out there. It’s my AWP home base.
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The Prestigious Fulbright Award Is for Creative Writers, Too

Katherine Arnoldi | January 2020

Do you have a novel you want to write that takes place in Sicily? Madagascar? Belarus? Tahiti?
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Hold the Pose: Self-Care for the Holidays

Regina Moya | December 2019

I love the holidays, but I tend to overdo it.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jess Row

AWP | December 2019

Every year I discover a panel or event focused on a subject or theme I've never thought about.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Donna Hemans

AWP | December 2019

I'm looking forward to discovering new journals and new writers and expanding the scope of writers and publications I read.
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The Tree Story

Sheila Black | December 2019

I have a friend, the poet Gaia Thomas, who posted recently that she is busy studying “the culture of kindness.” Something about that phrase caught at me and so I Facebooked her—“I love that idea; what is it exactly?”
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Matthew Zapruder

AWP | December 2019

I always love walking around the Bookfair, especially early in the morning, while everyone is bright and the first coffee is just kicking in.
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For the Love of Literature

Chelsea McLin | December 2019

It’s Christmastime again. It doesn’t really feel like it. My days of believing in Santa are far behind me, and putting up the Christmas tree in a small two-bedroom apartment doesn’t lift my spirits.
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The Unrecognized Present

Pamela Murray Winters | December 2019

There it was, under the tree, or next to the tree—as big as the tree. It was straight out of the Sears catalog. It might well have been the floor sample.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Raquel Salas Rivera

AWP | December 2019

I look forward to checking out all the small presses and running into people I otherwise wouldn’t see at the Bookfair. Since I’m now in Puerto Rico, I’ll get to see people I miss.
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Welcome to Holiday Tales

Juanita Lester | December 2019

Many welcome December like a warm blanket and a pair of cozy socks on a snowy day. Perhaps this isn’t your experience, and you dread the month of December—some people do. This is why last year we shared Holiday Tales and have decided to do so again this year.
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#AWP20 Featured Presenter Q&A with Marie Mockett

AWP | December 2019

AWP is where I binge buy poetry. Throughout the year, a few prose writers and I will exchange poems before we start working a part of the way we start the day.
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The Novel at the End of the World: An Inquiry

Hilary Plum | November 2019

And what, these days, is the novel for? The novel is a practice of attention.
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“I Really Hope You’ll Come Around”: Remembering David Berman

Ely Vance | October 2019

Few artists could do what David Berman could do. He brought his audience right next to him, onto the arm of a beat-up pull-out couch in Charlottesville or Nashville or Chicago, unflinching in his evocations of the absurd sea of noise we all sail upon, in his excavations of existential self-doubt, of daily self-hatred.
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Active Shooter: When Language Isn’t Enough

Carlie Hoffman | September 2019

We have reached a heartbreaking era in the United States in which the threat of active shooters is rampant. And to no resolve. School campuses are simultaneously places of learning and potential crime scenes. What good does art do in this reality?
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Something to Write About: Experiential and Observational Learning in the Creative Nonfiction Workshop

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman | September 2019

Advanced undergraduates know the basics of CNF, but, as young writers, they can benefit most from a professor who models how to seek, observe, and record real-life experiences.
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Giving Thanks to the Ampersand

Kate McDevitt | September 2019

Did you know that September 8 is National Ampersand Day?
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Staff Picks: End-of-Summer Reading

AWP | August 2019

We are quickly heading into back to school season, but what’s one more visit to the beach, with a good book and some quiet time?
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The Mentorship Program and My First Book

Laura Braverman | August 2019

…it seems to me that at the heart of the often emotionally fraught business of submissions and publishing is something quite simple really: an act of sharing.
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The PCJ Essay

Clifford Thompson | August 2019

As I was designing the courses I would teach, it occurred to me that many of the published essays I truly admire—which are the only kind I assign—fall into at least one of three categories. I have students write essays in each of the three, and for each category we look to the published essays as models.
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Witnessing the Furious Flowering of African American Poetry

Joanne V. Gabbin | August 2019

Twenty-five years ago, hundreds of poets, scholars, and poetry enthusiasts gathered at the Furious Flower Poetry Conference at James Madison University for what became the nation’s largest meeting devoted solely to Black poetry.
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Feeling Possible: Reflections on the Legacy of Toni Morrison

Chelsea McLin | August 2019

Toni Morrison’s narratives delve deep into Black identity, shedding light on the ways in which our nation has failed us and how we have failed each other.
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“School Daze”: A Memoir-Writing Course That Addresses Student Mental Health.…Notes From A ‘First Responder’

Elizabeth Stone | July 2019

A summary of the newest survey about the mental health of 67,000 undergraduates arrived in my email not long ago, and it was troubling.
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Citizen Uncensored: The Power of Student-Centered Learning

M.K. Rainey | July 2019

I’ve asked three of my students to collaborate on [Citizen] and show it as they experienced it: through their art.
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Queer Words: Reflections on Facilitating Writing Workshops with Homeless LGBTQ Youth

Sassafras Lowrey | June 2019

I became a writing facilitator in my early twenties in very much the same underground way that I began writing my own stories, self-taught and within community. I facilitated writing workshops with LGBTQ people experiencing homelessness, using the bits and pieces of how to facilitate that I had gleaned from other punk/zinester writers.
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Still Waiting

Kate McDevitt | June 2019

I believe everyone should have the joy of finding themselves represented in fiction. There is great power in relating to a character’s struggles but also their victories.
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I Wanna Be Rich: On the Financial Realities of Writing

Sheree Winslow | June 2019

When I was seven years old, people from the church we attended delivered bags of groceries to our apartment because my parents couldn’t afford food. A little more than a year later, when I was eight, I decided I wanted to attend Vassar College after reading about it in a book.
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Writing While…

A. Poythress | June 2019

I have depression. I have anxiety. I’ve suffered from many of the aspects of PTSD. I’m a lesbian, I’m nonbinary, I’m fat, my brain doesn’t work the same way others’ do. These are all labels I attach to myself as I navigate through the world.
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Reclaiming the Pansy

Bruce Owens Grimm | June 2019

Queer encompasses not just who I sleep with, but who I am. It’s how I interact with the world and, for better or worse, how the world interacts with me.
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Caught Reading in America

Pamela Murray Winters | May 2019

A year ago, I published my first book of poetry at the age of frhmm-mmsmm. My parents, having been already ancient when I was born, or so I once believed, weren’t around to celebrate this accomplishment.
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Songwriting and the Creative Process

Philip Gerard | May 2019

We begin by brainstorming common phrases and everyday words. As each of the students calls out a suggestion, I print it on the white board.
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Sentence Pioneers: Bending Language with Lydia Kiesling, R. O. Kwon, Ali Smith, Alyson Hagy, Jesse Ball, & Sally Rooney

Beth Kephart | May 2019

Some sentences heed the logic of a ruler. They are straight, scaled, and measured to the punctuated inch. There are the nouns. There are the verbs. There are the breaths readers should take. Rest assured, these sentences say: We will not perturb or angst you. We will not confuse you. We obey.... Then there’s the other kind.
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Don't Write Me Off

Haddiyyah Tegally | May 2019

As a bookworm, I tend to feel bad when I meet people who tell me that they rarely read a book, let alone open one. Reading, especially fiction, has always been such a beautiful escape for me that I have trouble understanding those who view it as a chore.
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To Raise a Reader

Paula Silva | May 2019

“I will buy you a book today. When you’re done reading it, we will come back and I will buy you another. I promise I will always buy you another book when you’re done reading, as long as I have money for it.”
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Beware of Books!

Ivania Cox | May 2019

“You will starve!” is probably the first thing people will tell you if you express your desire to become a writer or even just study literature—and the drama goes to the extreme of using starvation as a horrible destiny that everybody who dedicates his or her life to books will have to face.
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Destiny

Mmakgosi Anita Tau | May 2019

Destiny is a lie to some and a promise of purpose to others. Some with forlorn hope may see it as a scam. But I like to think of Destiny as the unconquerable spear that fights for its own when hardships make us forget who we are.
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A Space to Read

Firdous Hendricks | May 2019

For the past 10 years, I have used transformative art to engage and activate at-risk children and youth in after-school spaces. My students have taught me a lot, none more so than in my first year.
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Milk and Voice

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah | May 2019

The foreign newspapers came once a week, on the Thursday plane. I remember my father during siesta, his shoulders leaning against the headboard, the white sheets, the pages of the paper resembling outstretched wings.
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Color Me In, Please!

Priya N. Hein | May 2019

Instead of the tropical landscape I was used to, I was reading about European children who frolicked about in the pale white snow. They failed to reflect the life around me.
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A Surprising Gift in a Time of Loss

Jill Talbot | April 2019

Jill Talbot on her mentorship with Kendra Vanderlip
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The Talking Stick: Navigating Gender Inequity in Publishing

Sarah Bigham | April 2019

Like millions of other women, I have my own #MeToo stories, and, as much as it pains me to process the experiences that so many generations of women have endured, I am hopeful that bringing these stories to light will help ensure that those left with our memories are not so statistically certain to have similar things happen to them.
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Staff Picks: National Poetry Month 2019

AWP | April 2019

During National Poetry Month, the staff of AWP shared their favorite poetry.
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National Poetry Month: A Poem a Holiday

AWP | April 2019

Celebrate a holiday you have been looking forward to, with a poem to match, for National Poetry Month. No matter what you are celebrating, we hope these poems bring you joy and inspiration every day. These poems are for the week of April 22, 2019.
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National Poetry Month: A Poem a Holiday

AWP | April 2019

Celebrate a holiday you have been looking forward to, with a poem to match, for National Poetry Month. These poems are for the week of April 15, 2019.
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Dispatch from the Poetry Cave: On the Pleasures & Challenges of Coordinating the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Awards

Genevieve Kaplan | April 2019

It’s a pleasure to see books I’ve been hankering after arrive on my desk, to encounter wonderful new books by poets I haven’t heard of or read before, and to be confronted with the massive scope of American poetry.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Pam Houston

AWP | March 2019

At about the thirty-minute mark the door banged open and Larry floated in in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He had that way of walking, almost like a cartoon dog, where his feet didn't exactly touch the ground. He was all in leather, of course, and a couple of chains. He floated, more than walked to the podium. The room fell silent.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Ching-In Chen

AWP | March 2019

I loved the high energy, fun, and community gathered at last year’s Kundiman, Kaya Press & Asian American Literary Review Literaoke event. Even though I had just about lost my voice by that last night, I was lifted by all the love and camaraderie in the room.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Evie Shockley

AWP | March 2019

When I think about all the works I might not have encountered, without the funding that supported their creation and dissemination, I am really made aware of the profound importance of our collective investment in the arts.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jennifer Foerster

AWP | March 2019

I’m excited for the number of panels and readings featuring writers from the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
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Preparing to Pay Tribute to Donald Hall

Martin Lammon | March 2019

Looking ahead to the Donald Hall tribute at the next AWP Bookfair & Conference in Portland, I am rereading hundreds of letters from Don. Earlier, I shared the first postcard Don ever sent to me.
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Ditch the Quotes: Teach Your Students to Italicize Dialogue

Samantha Edmonds | March 2019

The first time I turned in a story with the dialogue in italics to my workshop, one person didn’t seem to get it.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Fady Joudah

AWP | March 2019

Since I was a teenager, I've wanted to speak with Malcolm X.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Ellen Bass

AWP | March 2019

I have many wonderful conference memories, but my favorite has to be meeting Toi Derricotte.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Carmen Giménez Smith

AWP | March 2019

My favorite conference memories most often have to do with reconnecting with other publishers and with folks from SPD to talk about what's ahead and what books we're excited to read. And the candy.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Camille Dungy

AWP | March 2019

I'd love a chance for a long, deep chat with Phillis Wheatley. I bet she would be super hip and sassy (and also deeply thoughtful) if she were alive today.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Dawn Lundy Martin

AWP | March 2019

Portland has some excellent cuisine. The last time I visited, I was very taken by a little ramen shop in a reclaimed warehouse space called Afuri.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Luis Alberto Urrea

AWP | February 2019

I love to walk the floor and connect with the editors and staffs of smaller presses and lit mags and I really enjoy solo author events.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Javier Zamora

AWP | February 2019

Favorite memory has to be my very first AWP in Minneapolis. The shock of it. The sheer amount of people interested in writing, flying to a conference, the commotion of the Bookfair, brushing shoulders with living legends, etc. It was overwhelming in a great way.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Lisa Ko

AWP | February 2019

It's critical for writers and artists to be valued for the work that we do.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Joan Silber

AWP | February 2019

Grants from the NEA and the NY Foundation on the Arts were hugely important to me as a younger writer. It’s not just the money, it’s the proof that you’re not crazy calling yourself a writer.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Mitchell S. Jackson

AWP | February 2019

I’ve thankfully received a handful of grants in the last few years. They give me the money to live, pay a bill, travel, keep my accounts from running anemic, but they also provide the encouragement to continue scribbling away. And that encouragement is invaluable.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Sandra Gail Lambert

AWP | February 2019

It's the squealing that happens when you turn a corner and right there is a friend you haven't seen since that last residency, conference, or reading.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jericho Brown

AWP | February 2019

I remember going to a panel with Toi Derricotte, Kay Murphy, and Alicia Ostriker back when I was getting my MFA. I was so happy to just lay eyes on and marvel at the genius of Ostriker. And I remember that their three talks left me with the feeling that I could indeed allow everything I have and know into my own poems.
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Unbinding Our Eyes: Poetry as a Way of Seeing

Nausheen Eusuf | February 2019

Poetry and vision have a long association—both in the sense of seeing the world intensely, and in the sense of sight that is visionary rather than ordinary.
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Teaching Critical Literary Citizenship

Robert McGill and André Babyn | February 2019

Some kinds of participation in literary citizenship are more valuable than others. Not considering carefully how one’s acts of literary citizenship might, for instance, serve corporate interests or rehearse exclusionary social practices could have harmful consequences.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Karen Russell

AWP | February 2019

I was so thrilled to give the keynote at AWP in 2015. It was a surreal and wonderful experience.
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What the World is Trying to Be: Lessons from John Goulet

Mauricio Kilwein Guevara | February 2019

Of the many things that John helped to clarify for me over the thirty years of our friendship is that literature at its best animates the core social functions of bringing humans closer to one another, of mitigating unwelcome solitude, and of growing our empathy for the world at large.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Joy Ladin

AWP | February 2019

The author I would most want to meet is Emily Dickinson, whom I have studied, read, and taught for decades.
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African-American History Month: Board Member Picks

David Haynes | February 2019

This month I’m celebrating books about vibrant black communities. Here are three terrific titles about coming of age and being nurtured by the village around you.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Paul Guest

AWP | February 2019

As great as the conference is, I’ve always been energized and refreshed—inspired—by those around me.
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Who Was I to Write? Persisting Through Doubt, Bias, and Parenthood

Olga Livshin | January 2019

It took me thirty-five years to stop doubting my English, a little over a year to write my first book, and just six months to get it accepted for publication.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

AWP | January 2019

I have my own large study where I write and the landscape here has really affected where my writing has taken me for my next book.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Max Wolf Valerio

AWP | January 2019

I wandered into a panel on crime writing—true crime, noir, hardboiled—and was overjoyed to hear swearing, blunt and forceful speech, no-nonsense direct language, and a generally intense, even inflamed atmosphere.... It occurred to me that possibly I had missed a calling. I am interested in exploring this type of writing at some point and seeing where it leads me.
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Ten Ways to Take Advantage of Your AWP Membership in the New Year

Megan Eden Kuyatt | January 2019

I’ve been an AWP member for years, but it’s only after working for AWP that I’ve begun to realize just how many resources we have for writers.
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Switching Genres

Ariel S. Winter | January 2019

Getting a book published isn’t a matter of selling the book to one excited editor. It is selling a book to that editor who then needs to go to a meeting to sell that book to the rest of the editorial team, the marketing team, and the sales team.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Victoria Chang

AWP | January 2019

I fall in love with words, not stars.
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How I Won My First Artist Grant

Sarah Dalton | January 2019

I knew that even if I didn’t get the grant, I’d learned a lot from Lyzette, Rosenberg’s book, and Alex about how to make my application provoke enthusiasm from the grant committee.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Martín Espada

AWP | January 2019

Boston, 2013: I gave a reading at a benefit for Split This Rock. A good friend of mine made a stunning entrance. The Hynes Convention Center will never be the same.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rebecca Makkai

AWP | January 2019

I've always wondered how F. Scott Fitzgerald would hold up at the hotel bar.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Adrian Matejka

AWP | January 2019

This is such a bountiful time for literature and poetry especially, so I’ll share a few new poetry collections I hope will get a little more attention.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Marilyn Chin

AWP | January 2019

My work would not have flourished without public funding—it’s the lifeblood of poetry.
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Writing My Way to a New Sort of Holiday: On Queerness & Christmas Stories

Sassafras Lowrey | December 2018

When I was seventeen years old, I ran away from my mother’s house to escape abuse (my mother would later plead guilty in court to her assault of me). I moved in with some adult friends, and that first Christmas three months after I ran away, they gave me a journal.
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AWP’s 2017–2018 Report on the Academic Job Market

Jason Gray | December 2018

A year off from AWP’s annual academic job report finds the state of affairs in higher education, unfortunately, not much improved, and trends settling in to become industry standards.
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Wake of History: On Coming to Poetry & Fighting for Indigenous Justice

Joy Harjo | November 2018

It was in this atmosphere of rising up that our arts flourished. It is here that I began writing poetry. I was motivated by justice, but justice didn’t write poetry. It inspired it.
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Ten Things NaNoWriMo Taught Me About the Writing Life

Meg Eden | November 2018

Entering November and drafting this year’s NaNoWriMo project, I found myself processing why I return to this event year after year. And the short answer is: because I need to be reminded of the basics of how to be a writer.
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Celebrating Native American Heritage Month: An Interview with the Indigenous-Aboriginal American Writers Caucus

AWP | November 2018

In continuation of our celebration of Native American Heritage Month, AWP invited members of the Indigenous-Aboriginal American Writers Caucus to respond to a few questions about the upcoming conference in Portland and about established and emerging Indigenous voices.
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Split This Rock: Celebrating 10 Years of Poetry, Witness, & Resistance

Sarah Browning | November 2018

When a group of poet-activists based in Washington, DC, began dreaming of the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival more than ten years ago now, one of our mentors in the work—the dean of DC’s literary scene, E. Ethelbert Miller—told us, “Pay attention to what you are doing. Keep notes and records. You are making history.”
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Hunker Down & Write: A Tribute to Philip F. Deaver

Diana Raab | October 2018

Only a handful of people who come into our lives make a true difference to us. For me, Philip Deaver was one of them, both professionally and personally.
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The Creepy Plastic Baby Head of Magical Writing Mojo

Sheila Squillante | September 2018

Round Baby is the name of the weird girl character at the center of my new poetry manuscript, which is currently out wandering the dusky streets of the book contest night market. The poems describe her as “mostly human, most of the time.” In some ways, Baby is my alter ego, the oddest and most powerful distillation of my shadow self.
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Going a Journey with Students

John Bennion | August 2018

I have more faith in human curiosity than Stevenson did; I believe that taking students walking and hiking—well away from the university, that center of busyness, where everything fits inside its proper box and where professors lecture rows of listeners—enlivens their minds and imaginations, especially when they are asked to write about their experiences.
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Sometimes it Takes a Community

Kate McDevitt | August 2018

Every writing group has a different structure, tone, and feel, so the trick is to find the one that works best for you. Or, in my case, get a group thrust upon you and turn it into what you want it to be.
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Harder, Better: Debuting Late in Life

Leslie Lawrence | July 2018

I was in my mid-twenties when I began writing in earnest; by the time I had a book accepted for publication, I was on Medicare.
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Story Ending Ethology: Endings Beyond Freytagian Resolution or Joycean Epiphany

Dustin M. Hoffman and Wendell Mayo | May 2018

We didn’t include cliffhangers or twists in our definitions, because they are what we consider the most common missteps that early writers stumble into because they haven’t found their stories yet. A story isn’t a story without knowing its entirety.
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Defensive Masculinity in the Creative Writing Workshop

Rachel Lyon | April 2018

It’s a cold winter evening and I’m hosting a creative writing class in my Brooklyn apartment.
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What’s an Older Job Seeker to Do?

Alyssa Colton | April 2018

Whatever your initial reasons for obtaining a writing degree, it’s doubtful that they were primarily about landing a great job.
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Why Freelance Writers Love Working Part-Time for Nonprofits

Christine Ro | March 2018

In some ways, Hannah Brown is living the dream. A few years out of college, she has a remote, part-time job working on a cause that’s deeply important to her. She also has the freedom to write about varied topics, from food to theater.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Melissa Hammerle

AWP | March 2018

Recently, several of us have lost our most influential literary mentors. In response, we hope to both honor and explore the role of mentorship in our writing lives.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Maggie Smith

AWP | March 2018

At AWP I always wish I could be seven places at once. There are so many panels, readings, and offsite events packed into those few days.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Brian Brodeur

AWP | March 2018

My hope is that attendees will leave this event both inspired and provoked.
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The '80s Are, Like, Ancient: Writing and Researching Modern Historical Fiction

Leslie Pietrzyk | March 2018

The time setting of my new novel, Silver Girl, is the late '70s and the early '80s, which I found was a challenging historical period to write about. (Yes, forty years ago is "historical fiction.")
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Aimee Nezhukumatathil

AWP | February 2018

Absolutely I feel like community is fostered and mentorship more widely available through creative writing programs.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Bob Shacochis

AWP | February 2018

A writer's main responsibility is not to be swept up and carried away by a cultural moment.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

AWP | February 2018

If I am writing about an historical event that is in connection to our current climate, how may I approach it differently? If I am writing about my personal lineage as it relates to global migration and displaced cultures, how may I explore this in a manner that touches upon a variety of expressions?
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with CJ Hribal & Participants Dean Bakopoulos & Peter Ho Davies

AWP | February 2018

I hope people come away with a larger sense of fiction’s possibilities for engaging with the smaller moments that can illuminate the larger issues.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Carmen Maria Machado

AWP | February 2018

I'm always excited for the exhibits at Nightboat Books, Dorothy: a publishing project, and Small Beer Press!
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Luanne Smith

AWP | February 2018

We all know certain women, real or imagined, out there are bad asses. They loom large in our minds, whether for their outspoken nature or their actions.
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Writing the Journey: Teaching Storytelling in the Undergraduate Workshop

Lawrence Coates | February 2018

Near the beginning of Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster states that the fundamental aspect of the novel is that it tells a story. He is a bit regretful about this, because he finds that story is a rather primitive and unlovely thing, designed only to make readers want to know what comes next; indeed, he compares story to a tapeworm.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rick Barot

AWP | February 2018

Given the urgencies within the self and the emergencies surrounding the self, each writer has to figure out his or her way into the work and the purpose of that work.
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#AWP18 Event Participant Q&A with Paul Morris, Jeff Kleinman, Anjali Singh, & Sarah Bowlin

AWP | February 2018

The author-agent relationship is one of the most important things to get right at the start of your career, or even when you’re considering a transition from one agent to another.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Nathan Englander

AWP | February 2018

There’s about a million things I want to do, and a million folks I want to see—the old friends and the new writers whose work I admire.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Katherine Coles

AWP | February 2018

The goal is to help attendees not only navigate such issues in their own lives, but also return to their institutions with specific ideas about how to identify and talk about problems.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Morgan Parker

AWP | February 2018

Acknowledging an artist's labor as a valuable and critical contribution to culture is the cornerstone of society, and investing in artists is investing in progress.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Patricia Spears Jones

AWP | February 2018

On the one hand there are many writers, teachers of writers, and programs in which they work. But are there more readers—serious, engaged readers of poetry? No one really knows.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Melanie Brooks

AWP | February 2018

For so many, hearing others share similar stories helped them find the courage to speak. The same is often true for writers of trauma.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Maud Casey

AWP | February 2018

The task is still to pay imaginative attention. James Baldwin, as usual, said it best: “to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.”
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Tyehimba Jess

AWP | January 2018

Public funding for the arts has been fundamental to my understanding of art and my ability to write.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Sofia Samatar

AWP | January 2018

It's fair to say that right now American politics are monstrous. We want to discuss, among other things, what's at stake in that notion.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Mary Ruefle

AWP | January 2018

Each writer must determine for herself what she means by “responsibility” and what hers is. Would that not be in itself an act of freedom? To write at all is an act of freedom, so any form of writing on any subject injects freedom into a world where we might not recognize it at large.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Virgil Suárez

AWP | January 2018

If it spent a small fraction of what it spends on the military on education, the arts, and medical research it be a completely different country.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Sherwin Bitsui

AWP | January 2018

Choosing a panel over another is always difficult—there are simply too many concurrent events.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Lisa Olstein

AWP | January 2018

We need it all: reflection and instigation; documentation and invention; discovery and disruption; sanctuaries and calls to arms and voyages into otherwise unthought and unfelt places.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with John Hoppenthaler

AWP | January 2018

Our panel is relevant today, and always, because history is that which is memorialized and documented.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Lauren Groff

AWP | January 2018

A writer’s responsibility is mostly the responsibility of being a good citizen: to be informed, to speak out against injustice, to vote, to pay taxes, to try to leave the world much better than we came into it.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Carey Salerno

AWP | January 2018

For those who are discovering June Jordan’s body of literary work, we hope they’ll find a deep appreciation for her revolutionary, singular voice.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with George Saunders

AWP | December 2017

I wouldn’t mind running into Dickens in the bathroom and cornering there at the hand-dryer until he told me how it felt in those weeks he was writing A Christmas Carol.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Amy Brill

AWP | December 2017

Looking back at the forces that brought us here is one way for writers to reckon with the racism, sexism, misogyny, and white nationalism of our times.
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What is Literature of Witness?

Ian King | December 2017

Witnessing something, whether it be a great moment in history or the view from one’s window, is something we, as human beings, do all the time, arguably even when we are asleep, witnessing something or other in our dreams.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Connie May Fowler

AWP | December 2017

Political, personal, and social transformation is impossible without empathy.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Molly Brodak

AWP | December 2017

I think we as writers are eager to talk about how to write our way through our current political moment at the same time that we write about our private lives—and how these connect.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Linda Rodriguez & Participants Mary Kathryn Nagel, Denise Low, & Diane Glancy

AWP | December 2017

We hope attendees will walk away with a deep appreciation of the contributions Diane Glancy has made, not only to Native literature, but the world of literature as well.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Cherríe Moraga

AWP | December 2017

How to continue along this path as a writer, knowing that your deepest impressions (your embodied knowledges) are not the stuff of mainstream literature.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with David Hassler

AWP | December 2017

Writing Across Borders interactive exhibit will experience short videos, posters, and photographs that give a human face and voice to the issue of how we welcome newcomers to our country.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Kao Kalia Yang

AWP | November 2017

One of my favorite features of AWP is the fact that I get to discover new writers and books each time I visit.
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#AWP18 Event Organizer Q&A with Michael Fischer

AWP | November 2017

Writers are masters of finding excuses for why the present place and moment isn’t conducive to our writing.
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#AWP18 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jamie Quatro

AWP | November 2017

I can’t wait to hear Lauren Groff and Nathan Englander in conversation, and I won’t miss Virgil Suarez or George Saunders.
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Research Beyond the Archives

Julia Gordon-Bramer | November 2017

Whether you have a term paper, a graduate thesis, or you’re planning to write a book, graduate writing students usually end up in library archives at some time in their academic career.
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How to Make Your Literary Magazine More Inclusive

Marlena Chertock | October 2017

Creating a more inclusive journal is one of the biggest challenges editors face. The issue is inherent in their role as gatekeepers.
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Creative Paradox: Writers Who Think “Inside” the Box

Tess Callahan | September 2017

From Miranda to Murakami, discerning writers reject the cliché: “think outside the box.” Instead, they custom-make boxes and wedge themselves inside.
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Kindergarten, When You’re a Writer and a Solo Mom

Alison Stine | August 2017

At the door we say goodbye. He hugs me. I tell him I love him, hand him his lunch. He’s already shouldered on the backpack. His teacher shakes his hand, as she shakes the hand of all the children and wishes them good morning. He goes into the classroom determinedly. He doesn’t look back.
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Making Poetry Pay: Five Ways to Increase Your Poetry Income

Erika Dreifus | July 2017

Not everyone writes poetry for financial profit. But for some writers, earning payment beyond bylines, copies, and karma matters. Sometimes, it matters a lot.
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Writing from Another Country

John Coyne | July 2017

Throughout the history of literature in the United States, American writers have looked towards, and gone to, foreign countries to seek inspiration, new experiences, and find work.
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Poetry, Thought, and the Teaching Arts: From Workshop to the Poems as Questions Project

Bruce Bond | July 2017

Far from banishing the student writer from critical conversation about his or her poem, I like to take notes as the student responds to my questions.
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Talking to Neil Aitken about De-Canon and POC in the Creative Writing Classroom

AWP | June 2017

On Tuesday, June 20, a series of posts written by Neil Aitken for his site De-Canon: A Visibility Project came to the attention of AWP staff.
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Eight Things This Fiction Writer Learned About Historical Research

Leslie Pietrzyk | June 2017

I’m not a natural researcher, so Lord only knows what I was thinking, deciding to write a novel set in 1899 in Chicago.
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Fiction Hunger

Askold Melnyczuk | May 2017

Nearly every aspect of the world in which I was raised in Northern New Jersey had been translated from elsewhere.
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Mentoring Gender Fluid and Trans Students in Writing Classes

Glen Retief | April 2017

“What’s with all these initials?” he asked me, presumably because I was a gay man, although perhaps also because I was a quarter century his junior. “LGBT—Q,A,B,C, D—where will it end?”
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"Off from the Center Like Horses": Structuring Short Story Collections

Siân Griffiths | April 2017

The seed of my question was selfish: I wanted to know how to put together a collection so that I could put together my own. I wanted a manual. I wanted how to.
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Writing for the Screen

Alexandra Salerno | March 2017

In particular, the explosion of scripted television and streaming platforms has driven so much growth that the entertainment industry is ripe with employment opportunities for writers looking for creative day jobs. And I’m living proof.
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Why Write?

Daniel M. Jaffe | March 2017

Having taught creative writing for more than twenty years, I am accustomed to the standard student questions of “why write?” and “why create art?” My replies about the importance of exploring self and helping readers feel less alone, although sincere, have grown somewhat formulaic and time-worn. Unexpectedly, a recent tour of Terezín, the Nazis’ ghetto-concentration camp outside Prague, has led me to renewed contemplation of writing’s value.
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About Authorial Identity

Ronald Goldfarb | February 2017

The literary world is pondering the disclosure in the US and abroad, in four languages, that the books by internationally celebrated author Elena Ferrante, most noted for her quartet of novels (2011–2014) set in Naples, Italy, may have been written by her translator, Anita Raja.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Hannah Tinti

AWP | February 2017

It’s been exciting to see the literary world expand this way, and to see so many people coming into the field later in life, bringing their own unique experiences.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Viet Thanh Nguyen

AWP | February 2017

It’s necessary to find the balance that is appropriate for you. I can only speak for myself in saying that I’ve always been a writer who sees himself as politically and socially committed.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Karen Joy Fowler

AWP | January 2017

I'm hoping someone has advice for me on how to be a writer and a person in the next four years.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Danez Smith

AWP | January 2017

When artists are taken care of we all are taken care of.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rikki Ducornet

AWP | January 2017

The creative imagination is the agency that releases us from all that compromises our capacity for clarity and so: transformation. We are wired to think creatively, just as we are wired to play, to be curious, to wander, to fall in love, to ask questions, to overcome obstacles, to search for answers.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Angela Flournoy

AWP | January 2017

I'm crossing my fingers for an Edward P. Jones sighting. I'd love to talk about movies with him because I think his writing has a very evocative, cinematic quality.
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The Challenge is Respect

Colette Lunday | January 2017

He was holding his hand to me and I could take it if I wanted to be a better writer.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with J. Mae Barizo

AWP | January 2017

I'm very grateful for grants and funding I've received. But there's always more need for writers from underrepresented, marginalized communities.
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Sounding Out Poetry

Emily K. Michael | January 2017

As a blind woman, I do not court silence. The absence of sound in the presence of other people often makes me apprehensive. With no audible messages, I’m left to wonder what others are thinking and doing.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rita Dove

AWP | January 2017

Prior to AWP and the proliferation of creative writing programs, for a writer to be assured some measure of financial security, she would have had to earn a degree in a field not quite aligned to her special expertise.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Azar Nafisi

AWP | January 2017

I define creative writing a subversive discipline thriving in a highly theoretical academic atmosphere.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Margot Livesey

AWP | January 2017

It seems a wonderful thing that so many people are now getting to live in the world of words.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Emma Straub

AWP | January 2017

Public funding makes creative work possible for many, many people.
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AWP’s 2015–2016 Report on the Academic Job Market

Jason Tucker | December 2016

This newest addition to AWP’s Academic Job Market Report series finds the trends of fewer full-time tenure-track jobs and the increased use of part-time adjunct labor continuing. This is no doubt bleak, but if there is something to hope for amongst the dismal news, it is that awareness of the problem is increasing.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Sarah Manguso

AWP | December 2016

Listen more; risk more; assemble. That's the advice I wish I'd heard a year ago.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Thomas Mallon

AWP | December 2016

I'd hope to run into George Orwell, to hear what he had to say about all the rubbish and cant talked in this country on both the left and the right.
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Liberating Narcissism: Twenty-first Century’s “Turn Within” and the Value for Fiction Writers and Fiction Writing Instructors

Aaron Tillman | December 2016

Before you read this monumentally important essay on the timely topic of narcissism, I want to acknowledge how thrilling this must be for you, and to say how truly touched I am by your excitement and awe.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Tim Seibles

AWP | December 2016

Don’t be afraid to write what you see. Part of a writer’s obligation is to be articulate in difficult socio-political circumstances.
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Fiction in the Age of Social Media

Alix Ohlin | December 2016

The first time I gave a reading, I shared the stage with a writer who introduced herself as “the inventor of the email novel.” Someone in the audience laughed, and she frowned. “It’s just like an epistolary novel,” she explained. “But with email.”
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Patricia Engel

AWP | December 2016

I love catching as many panels as possible, though there is never enough time to see them all.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Eileen Myles

AWP | December 2016

Meeting in great numbers and even writing for choral situations rather than solo voices is profound and valuable.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Paul Lisicky

AWP | December 2016

I suppose the downside is that the “career” side of things is often over-emphasized. It can be too easy to lose sight of why we do this.
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#AWP17 Featured Presenter Q&A with Aminatta Forna

AWP | November 2016

I'd talk to her about what it meant to commit a life to a single artistic and intellectual endeavor in the fight against oppression.
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Food Similes in Consider the Oyster

Betsy K. Brown | November 2016

M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster is a series of short essays dedicated to the life, death, and culinary potential of the oyster. Many of the chapters contain descriptions vivid enough to make the reader hungry. The narrator often explains what it is like to eat an oyster through multifaceted similes.
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How to Grow a Writing Life

Leslie Pietrzyk | October 2016

When I think about the elements needed to sustain oneself as a writer, I come up with four basics: talent, hard work, perseverance, and luck. What’s immediately apparent is that we control only two...
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Addressing Structural Racism in Creative Writing Programs

Kazim Ali | October 2016

A diverse and inclusive creative writing classroom is vital to the success of that classroom as well as a vital part of addressing larger social and political issues surrounding race. Yet students of color are badly underrepresented in the average creative writing classroom.
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Still a Maker: A Profile of Melissa Green

Leslie McGrath | September 2016

Melissa Green is one of the most lauded poets you may never have heard of. For decades she has lived a very quiet life near Boston, writing poems as unmarked by contemporary poetic fashion as they are ravishing.
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Show Your Joy: Getting and Preparing for an Academic Interview

Dora Malech | August 2016

In 2005, I added my newly earned MFA degree to the top of my CV and proceeded to apply for every tenure-track job that included the words “Poetry” or “Creative Writing.”
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The Other Side of the Game: Reconciling My Reading and My Rearing in the Literary World

Kyle G. Dargan | August 2016

As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, the two exhibits of opulence that most astounded me were the dining hall buffets and the library collections. While I did not horde food, I often took books (ones I couldn’t believe were so readily available to me) and hid them in secret spots throughout the Alderman Library stacks.
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A Narrow, Intimate Space: Mentorship as Mirror

Benjamin Ludwig | August 2016

"We had some things in common, which helped. She had worked for two summers in Alaska, and I had lived there. Her work-in-progress was about an artist, and so was mine. She worked as a librarian, and I’d worked as a mentor for English/language arts teachers for years. What did it, though, was her writing. Colette’s manuscript."
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The Source of Poetry

Sarah Rose Nordgren | July 2016

On the first day of graduate poetry workshop with Linda Gregg, I was surprised when she began class by talking about her daily practice of walking around her neighborhood (NYC’s East Village), and then went around the room so that each of us—by way of introduction—could share what we did for exercise.
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Tediousness: On Accessibility Issues Deafblind and Blind Writers Face

Sarah Katz | June 2016

“It is tedious,” says Mani Iyer, a deafblind writer currently studying in the MFA Program at Lesley University, speaking of writing on his own as opposed to working with his mentor at Lesley, Teresa Cader. “As [Teresa] read to me some of my poems, I couldn’t believe how good it sounded, in contrast to what the screen reader would read to me.”
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Revising the Question: Thoughts on MFA vs NYC and the Larger Problems of Institutionalized Creative Writing

Darin Ciccotelli | May 2016

When the larger cultural elite takes on this thing called the MFA—when it interrogates the rise of creative writing, as it seems to do every couple of years——usually starts by asking The Question. You know the one. You’ve already heard it a hundred times. Saying it at this point feels more like lip-synching.
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Tea and Windows: An Expansive View of Literary Fiction

Siân Griffiths | May 2016

This summer, I stumbled on a podcast of two acclaimed writers, one interviewing the other. The interviewee said that he had grown bored with literary fiction because of its lack of attention to plot, accusing the genre of focusing too often upon characters whose only actions were to sip tea and look out windows.
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Be a Literary Agent

John Coyne | April 2016

I called a novelist friend and asked her if she knew of any MFA graduates who were employed as literary agents and she replied, “MFA graduates are writers, not agents.” She was categorically right, but she wasn’t totally correct.
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Q&A with Marcia Aldrich, 2011 AWP Award Series Winner for Creative Nonfiction

Sarah Katz | April 2016

I’ve created a collection of essays by contemporary women writers who have been instrumental in moving the essay to the center of the literary stage.
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Q&A with Andrew Ladd, 2012 AWP Award Series Winner for the Novel

Sarah Katz | April 2016

I was living in New York when I first heard I’d won the award. Since then I got married, moved to London, had a baby. It feels like a whole life ago.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Linda Gregerson

AWP | March 2016

It’s fun, for one thing, to see the friends we adore but see too rarely and the writers we’ve admired from afar.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Joyce Carol Oates

AWP | March 2016

These are wonderful opportunities for writers to meet readers and one another. I have had memorable on-stage interviews and conversations, & very worthwhile panels.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Susan Orlean & Domingo Martinez

AWP | March 2016

Conferences, retreats, workshops, and gatherings are so important for writers. We all benefit from realizing that we're not alone in our lonely trade, and that it matters to keep doing it.
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Prompt Writing: Not Just for Workshop

Leslie Pietrzyk | March 2016

Every August, at least one teacher in my Facebook feed asks for writing prompts, seeking exercises to loosen up and build bonds in early, awkward, typically undergraduate workshops. It makes sense that beginning writers need some handholding in the form of a guided prompt: Everyone, write about an early birthday. But it seems to me that many experienced writers discount prompt writing, viewing the practice as excellent exercise for, well, someone else, someone who needs their hand held and isn’t ready yet for “real” writing.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rigoberto González

AWP | March 2016

One of my favorite books of 2015 is actually AWP’s Donald Hall Prize for Poetry winner, Karankawa by Iliana Rocha.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jonathan Lethem & Geoff Dyer

AWP | March 2016

At a conference like AWP we also enjoy an opportunity to briefly remake the world in our own image—an entire population, overflowing the lobbies and bars of a number of hotels, who actually care about this stuff.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Luis Rodriguez

AWP | March 2016

I also think AWP’s panels and readings this year are some of the most diverse and innovative to date. Yes, more can be done—and I will always be a voice and advocate for this. Still, I’m going to make the most of the many fine ideas, skills, and knowledge that AWP brings to Los Angeles in 2016.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Elizabeth McKenzie

AWP | March 2016

it’s amazing to have the names you’ve seen in the mastheads, the editors you’ve sent things to and maybe corresponded with, right there in front of you, three-dimensional and alive, ready to talk to you, not to mention the writers you’ve read who are also there to talk and listen to.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Natasha Trethewey

AWP | March 2016

I've been going to the AWP Conference for nearly twenty years and it has remained one of my favorite ways to reconnect with friends across the country.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Douglas Kearney & Gregory Pardlo

AWP | February 2016

I’ve been thinking recently about ways to more fully attend to joy in my work—but even thinking of “joy” brings to mind a range of nuanced ideas.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Laura Kasischke

AWP | February 2016

It’s a nearly surreal experience to see so many old friends at one time in one place.
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An Undergraduate Novel-Writing Course

Audrey Colombe, Paola Crespo, and Susanna Jones | February 2016

Undergraduate creative writing curriculum has developed rapidly in the past ten to fifteen years and reflects a growing concern with focused study and distinct (or “measureable”) outcomes.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Philip Klay

AWP | February 2016

I actually don't think of writing as such a solitary act. For me, community is essential.
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You and Your Future Colleagues: Tips for the Interview

Katharine Coles | February 2016

Almost all of my suggestions here, then, focus on very practical, even mundane things that are nonetheless important.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with D.A Powell & Marilyn Nelson

AWP | February 2016

I think a bunch of us are gonna sneak off to Knott's Berry Farm!
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Let’s All Please Applaud Her Efforts: The Funny and Feminist Poetry, Labor, and Domesticity of Monica Fambrough

Kathleen Rooney | February 2016

Monica Fambrough is a poet, parent, and former book publicist whose debut collection, Softcover, is strikingly good: direct, honest, funny, and full of clarity and grace. The poems are lovely in their techniques and structures, but the content, too, is fascinating for the way she seems to execute a kind of reverse imitative fallacy.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Kelly Link

AWP | February 2016

I meet up with a couple of writers a couple of times a week and we all work together.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Richard Bausch

AWP | February 2016

Almost all the writers I know are outlandishly gregarious people who love to tell stories and gather to do so. Given this fact, the conference makes perfect sense to me.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rachel Eliza Griffiths

AWP | February 2016

It's such a large community that each conference you're likely to meet new writers and editors who care about the politics and practices of writing, craft, and publishing.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Peter Davies & Roxana Robinson

AWP | February 2016

I think it can be very heartening to meet other members of your tribe. Writers are peculiar creatures, and if you feel you are the only one of your kind, it’s dispiriting. Finding the rest of your kin is crucial!
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Juan Felipe Herrera

AWP | February 2016

Community is the magic word. We need it.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Leslie Jamison

AWP | January 2016

I love meeting people face-to-face that I have corresponded with—or admired—from afar, editors and writers alike.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jess Walter

AWP | January 2016

I find it thrilling to see so many people chewing on ideas and issues I've never considered or have only contemplated alone in the quiet of my office.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Naomi Shihab Nye

AWP | January 2016

Discovering so many books and voices you never knew before.
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An Interview with Eileen Cronin & Tim Dalton

Eileen Cronin & Tim Dalton | January 2016

We at AWP had remembered Tim Dalton’s application from an earlier session. He had expressed the desire for a mentor who understood issues of the disability community, and we did not have any mentors with that experience. We told him we would keep looking for him. When Eileen applied to serve as a mentor this past spring, we immediately thought of Tim and the match was soon made. We asked them to share some of their perspectives on the program, writing, and disability.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Francisco Goldman

AWP | January 2016

I think I'm most excited to hear Maggie Nelson speak. She's so brilliant but I've never listened to her in person.
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#AWP16 Featured Presenter Q&A with Robin Coste Lewis

AWP | January 2016

I come to AWP to see my friends! Because writing is so solitary, as you say, and because I'm often reclusive, the chance to kiss the cheeks of folks I adore, all in one spot, is just irresistible.
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How to Start an MFA Program from Scratch (Part 3 of 3): Opening the Doors

Christopher Coake | January 2016

What I’d like to address in this, the last post, are some of the practical difficulties—and outright surprises—we faced in implementing the program, and how we faced them.
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An Interview with Dale Griffiths Stamos & Kelly Jo Eldredge (Playwriting)

Dale Griffiths Stamos & Kelly Jo Eldredge | January 2016

We interviewed our playwriting pair, Dale Griffiths Stamos and Kelly Jo Eldredge, at the conclusion of the Fall 2015 session.
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“Sometimes It’s the Stuff You Love that Hurts You the Most”: An Interview with Poet and Visual Artist Rachel Slotnick

Kathleen Rooney | December 2015

A poet, a painter, a muralist, and a teacher, native Californian Rachel Slotnick is a ray of sunshine—not in the cliché or simplistic sense, but in that both she and her work are radiant and essential.
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AWP’s 2014–15 Report on the Academic Job Market

Daniel D’Angelo | December 2015

Since 1988, AWP has published annual reports on the academic job market and the plight of adjunct faculty members. Since 1995, our website has provided free, continuous public access to these reports.
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Storytellers: Writers Working in Communications

Katherine Perry Harris | November 2015

Talk with any of your writer friends, and surely they can share a bit of writerly trivia about the early jobs of now-famous writers: William S. Burroughs worked as an exterminator. Charles Dickens was a factory worker. Raymond Carver found work at a saw mill, and later as a janitor and a delivery man while building his short story career. And who knew that Harper Lee was an airline ticket agent back in the day, writing in her spare time? Flash forward to the present day, and sure enough you and your own writer friends have held a series of interesting jobs, whether it’s cleaning houses, serving as a hospital orderly, or walking dogs.
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How to Start an MFA Program from Scratch (Part 2 of 3): Why Do You Need an MFA Program, Anyway?

Christopher Coake | November 2015

In my last post, I recounted how my colleagues and I in the English department at the University of Nevada, Reno, proposed and saw through to approval our brand-new MFA program in creative writing. In this post I want to break down the ways we justified the creation of the new program, to ourselves and to others.
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Cross-dressing for Workshop: Or, The Uses of Translation in Creative Writing

Russell Scott Valentino | November 2015

Isaiah Berlin once famously set out hedgehogs and foxes as categories of thinkers on the basis of a Greek fragment from the poet Archilochus: The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
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"Making the Lonely a Little More Bearable": An Interview with Mr. Bear, Literary Podcaster Extraordinaire

Kathleen Rooney | October 2015

Mr. Bear is the ideal reader, the kind of reader many authors either explicitly or unconsciously hope for when they sit down to write: someone discerning but generous, funny but sad, smart but not distant, who encounters literary work with a curious brain and an open heart, and who relishes the pieces that hit both places.
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The Benefits of the University-Based Creative Writing Fellowship

Sarah Katz | September 2015

You’ve turned in your thesis and graduated from an MFA program in creative writing. OK, now what?
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How to Start an MFA Program from Scratch (Part 1 of 3)

Christopher Coake | September 2015

This semester marks the beginning of the new Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing here at the University of Nevada, Reno. Our first class is eleven students strong; as of this writing they have gone through all their orientations, attended their first workshops and seminars, and taught their first composition classes.
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The Multigenre Workshop

Richard Katrovas | September 2015

It’s nothing new. Many English departments offer such courses at the entry, undergraduate level.
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"Snapping Intimately Within the Air": The Radical Humanity of the Hand-Typed Chipbook

Kathleen Rooney | August 2015

Emily Dickinson was a triple threat: poet, baker, gardener. Chicago writer Eric Plattner is also one: poet, teacher, typewriter repairman.
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The Poetry Project Book: A Marriage of Heart and Mind

Cynthia Marie Hoffman | July 2015

Though poetry project books have a long history, they currently enjoy unprecedented popularity in the MFA thesis classroom and on the publication circuit. But what makes a book of poetry a project book?
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The Strangeness of the Dream: On Process Videos, Writing, and Creativity

Hannah Stephenson | June 2015

In Inception (that wacky, mind-bending movie about dream-making and art-making), the success and believability of the dreams depends on not questioning the worlds that have been created. Realizing, mid-dream, that a dream is going on will cause the scene to explode, fractal-style, until the dreamer is woken up.
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Teaching Creative Writing Through Material Culture; or, Zooming In On the Elephant in the Room

Christine Wiesenthal | June 2015

To think through things is to recall that “things . . . can be portals,” as Aislinn Hunter notes in her wonderfully strange book of paratexts, Peepshow with Views of the Interior.
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Now What? In the Afterglow of AWP15...

Leslie Pietrzyk | May 2015

You had an amazing time at AWP15.... Now it’s back to home and the same old routine. How can you keep that conference energy going with the real world pressing hard?
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Everyday Failure

Matthew Zapruder | April 2015

During my first few years in graduate school I was doing a lot of failing. I was writing a lot, but I knew somehow my poems weren’t right yet.
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I Want to Get Paid to Travel the World!

Suzanne Roberts | April 2015

On the first day of my travel writing class, I ask my students why they are taking the class, what they hope to get out of it, where they want their writing to go. Many of them say some version of this: I want to travel the world and get paid to write about it!
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Thinking Through the Long Poem

Matthew Zapruder | March 2015

It’s been my experience that in the course of writing a lot of poems, it is natural to get into the habit of being on the lookout for an ending.
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Writers from the Peace Corps

John Coyne | March 2015

Since 1961, Peace Corps writers have used their volunteer service as source material for their fiction and nonfiction. These writers have also found that the overseas experience has helped them find jobs once they returned home.
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Not as Easy as You Think: Re-evaluating the Workshop Model

Oindrila Mukherjee | February 2015

In his book, Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five Canon Approach, Tom C. Hunley says that the workshop method “functions more as a convenience for the instructors than as a vehicle for meeting the needs of students.
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Everyday Creativity

Matthew Zapruder | February 2015

Last fall at the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College in the Bay Area, I taught a craft course called Everyday Creativity.
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Seeking the Work-Life-Writing Balance Post-MFA

Kirsten Clodfelter | December 2014

The rumor isn’t exactly a new one: After you graduate with an MFA, there’s a chance you might find yourself shelving the novel draft, or maybe even completely regretting your MFA in the first place, because it’s just too difficult to balance a viable work life with a viable writing life.
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Impractical Advice, or Why the Hell Wouldja Choose an MFA Program Anyways?

D.A. Powell | December 2014

Since writing’s a solo act for the most part, just as much self-taught as self-learnt—and all roads lead to the same god anyway and all careers are dead-ends—it seems strange that so many of us folks who write should choose to congregate in institutions like conscientious objectors waiting out an unjust war.
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The 2013-14 Report on the Academic Job Market: Adjunct Unions, Administrative Bloat, & Reform of Student Loans

Susan Falcon | November 2014

Those who plan to become professors in the arts and humanities have little recourse than to start working as adjuncts. While adjuncts vie for job security in academia, institutions continue to employ more adjuncts than ever to fulfill teaching appointments, while the number of open tenure-track positions remains small for a growing student population.
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Kurt Brown and What You Can Do for Poetry

David J. Rothman | November 2014

During the summer of 1990 I took a break from my graduate studies and spent several weeks in Aspen, helping Kurt Brown to run the 15th Aspen Writers’ Conference.
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If You Seek a Full-Time Writing and Publishing Career

Jane Friedman | November 2014

When I applied to undergraduate programs in the early 1990s, I only considered one type of degree: the BFA in creative writing. I’ve now forgotten why I fixated on such an eccentric degree that only ten schools in the country offered at the time.
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Decisions & Superstitions: On Choosing a Program

Laura Kasischke | October 2014

The great French writer Honoré de Balzac attended no MFA program, so he never needed to decide which program to attend.
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Everything You Need to Think about Before You Apply to an MFA Program

Elizabeth McCracken | October 2014

First of all: remember that you don’t need an MFA to write. Most of world literature was created by people without MFAs. The excellent thing about writing is that it is still an unlicensed profession.
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Twelve Questions You Should Ask Before You Enroll in an MFA Program

Pam Houston | September 2014

Do the professors who teach in this program actually know how to write? I know, it sounds crazy, but very few first-year grad students have actually read the work of the faculty they are about to study with for the next two-to-three years.
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Beef Jerky, Bras, and Car Parts: Writing for Advertising

Rachel Kessler | August 2014

F. Scott Fitzgerald did it, Salman Rushdie did it, Don DeLillo did it – it is no surprise that many serious writers have made their rent by writing copy for advertisements.
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One Book to Rule Them All:
Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then

Ru Freeman | July 2014

In the Spring of 2013, in preparation for a Master/Class conversation I would be doing with Jamaica Kincaid for the PEN World Voices Festival in April of that year, I spent a week reading all the books she had ever written, beginning with At the Bottom of the River (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), on through her nonfiction including the death of her brother (My Brother, 1997) and her sojourn into the Himalayas in search of flowers (Among Flowers, 2005), all the way to her latest novel, See Now Then (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
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How to Open

Steve Almond | June 2014

Of the many dogmas that afflict creative writing classes these days, none is more abused—and therefore more odious—than in medias res.
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Making It Work: Writers Finding Careers

Dave Essinger | June 2014

When I began organizing a panel called “Good Luck with That: Writers Paying Bills” for the AWP conference in Seattle, it wasn’t difficult at all to find qualified and enthusiastic participants. More writers with diverse professional careers were willing to share their experiences than we had room for on a single panel.
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Consider the Digital Disruption

Steve Almond | June 2014

A few months ago, I had the odd experience of serving on a panel entitled The Digital Disruption, which had been convened to answer a basic question: why are writers of literary fiction not taking advantage of digital innovation as much as their colleagues who write genre fiction?
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Why I Travel

Ru Freeman | May 2014

I am a reluctant immigrant, someone who, like thousands of others, only came to the United States for a specific purpose—in my case, a college degree—and who, for a multitude of reasons that are wholly personal, ended up never being able to go home.
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Heart to Chart: Helping Students Visualize Our Responses to Their Fiction

Donald Secreast | May 2014

At some point in a creative writing class, a teacher must talk to a student in fairly concrete terms about the flaws in his or her writing. I prefer to conduct these serious evaluations as a personal conference in my office.
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From Workshop to Marketplace:
How to Find the Right Readers

Steve Almond | May 2014

I recently took part in a strange-but-instructive event called “Literary Idol” at The Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston.
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On Ten Things Writers Do:
Honesty from Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman | May 2014

There’s an essay that gets posted on social media every few months or so, called "The Odd Habits and Curious Customs of Famous Writers."
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The Creative Writer at the University Press

Kevin Haworth | April 2014

In Summer 2013, Peter Givler stepped down after fifteen years as Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), the umbrella group for university presses—roughly AWP’s equivalent in the scholarly publishing world.
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On Influence:
I Will Write in the Presence of Mentors

Ru Freeman | March 2014

"...one way or another, those books and those writers whose words, or work, or world-view, or disposition I need to fuel my stories will slide under my feet and steady them."
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All About the AWP Conference:
How to Swim in a Sea of Writers

Roxane Gay | February 2014

The first year I attended AWP, I hated it. There were so many people, everywhere, and they were impossibly chic, so that made them even more intimidating.
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On the Enchantments and Uses of Bad Writing

Steve Almond | February 2014

Not long ago, I held a workshop on writing sex scenes. I began this workshop by reading a short erotic story called “A Seminal Release.” As the title might imply, the piece is among the worst examples of sex writing known to man, an astonishing compendium of inappropriate adverbs and gratuitous genital euphemisms.
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Acquisitions Editing: Centurions at the Gate

Susan Falcon | February 2014

Many college graduates and others looking for employment in the publishing industry may wonder what opportunities exist aside from the more well-known copy editor, editorial assistant, or editor-in-chief jobs.
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Rocks in a River, These Hands Held Out to Each Other:
The Creative Writing Community

Ru Freeman | December 2013

I have two answers to questions that seem to alternately stump or delight my audiences whenever I read or speak. One, that I don’t have an MFA and two, that I love Facebook.
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Hired!

How to Approach the Job Hunt in Today’s Tough Climate

Alyse Knorr | December 2013

Writers today, whether pursuing an academic or a nonacademic career, face a more competitive market than ever before. Job-seekers can take heart, however, with the knowledge that, by taking advantage of opportunities and cultivating one’s professional self, success on the market is possible.
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Let Obsession Be Your Ally: Be Haunted By It

Steve Almond | November 2013

Like most every other narcissistic writer on earth, I figured the heavens would part the moment I published my first book, and God Herself would gaze down upon me and set her soft soft fingers to my heart and banish from my body all traces of doubt, insecurity, and resentment. This did not happen.
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The Eight Questions Writers Should Ask Themselves

Roxane Gay | November 2013

Your answers can make you a better writer.
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2012-13 Annual Report on the Academic Job Market

The State of the Market, the Plight of the Adjunct, and the Affordable Care Act

Sara Flood | November 2013

With fewer chances to move into full-time positions, and more instructors saturating the market, adjuncts are finding themselves stuck in limbo for longer. It is estimated that such positions comprise roughly 75 percent of all college instructors.
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The Late, Great, Elmore Leonard

Ronald Goldfarb | October 2013

Elmore Leonard recently died. In a career spanning sixty years, the 87-year old Leonard was a prolific (over eight million copies of his books are in print) and eventually (like us all he had his early rejections) hugely successful writer—about forty novels and hundreds of short stories. He died working on his 46th novel. “His prime never ended,” one critic noted.
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The Writing Residency

Ru Freeman | September 2013

If there is one thing every writer dreams of, it is this: someone else to tend to the mundane business of putting a roof over our heads and food in our bellies while we spend our days playing in the dirt with words.
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Why Are You Here?

Bob Hicok | September 2013

[I]f you’re not careful, being in an MFA can get in the way of writing.
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Thomas James and Lucien Stryk: “and you / My first live poet”

Susan Azar Porterfield | September 2013

Lucie Brock-Broido reintroduced the poetry of Thomas James to the world some thirty years after he committed suicide in 1974, shortly after publishing his first book, Letters to a Stranger (1973).
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The Writer’s Essential Tool: Self-Inventory

Steve Almond | September 2013

Whenever I speak to a group of writing students, or aspiring writers, or people who are just preparing to make the potentially humiliating decision to become aspiring writers, I get asked two questions.
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Business and Technical Writing Specialization: A promising option for creative writers

Kate Nesheim | August 2013

Those of us who are already waist-deep in a program sometimes ask ourselves if, at the end of all this, there will be a job that pays well enough.
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How to Put Words in Someone’s Mouth: Teaching the Dramatic Monologue

Benjamin S. Grossberg | July 2013

I love teaching the dramatic monologue, those poems in which the speaker is understood as a character distinct from the person of the poet. I love teaching the form because some of my favorite poems are monologues—and because it often occasions breakthroughs in student writing.
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Right on Time

Getting the Timing Right – is There a Perfect Time to Pitch?

Devyani Borade | June 2013

‘Thank you for sending me your wonderful article,’ read the editor’s reply. I smiled. ‘I would have accepted it but...’ I frowned. This did not bode well. ‘...but in the next issue we are publishing a similar article. So I am sorry but I cannot use your piece – bad timing!’
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Creative Writing and the Twenty-first Century Workplace

Abby Bardi | May 2013

Throughout his high school years, my nephew Matthew was asked repeatedly by well-intentioned associates what he is planning to major in when he goes to college. His consistent response was that he planned to major in creative writing. While pleased at his commitment to my chosen field, I have also felt stirrings of concern: what would he do with a degree in a course of study that often seems, even to those of us who teach it, like a somewhat self-indulgent, even airy-fairy pursuit?
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Look Here, Graduate: Consider Teaching in a Private School

Kurt Caswell | February 2013

After his reading at the Bread Loaf School of English a couple years ago, the poet John Ashbery was asked if he made his living primarily through the sale of his books. An electrical storm had knocked out the power, and Ashbery read by flashlight in the dining room. God no, he answered, the flashlight illuminating his ghostly face. Very few writers can. But teaching, he said, is one thing a writer can do to make a living.
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Annual Report on the Academic Job Market

Kristin Hahn | December 2012

While independent presses and online magazines seem to be flourishing, and while MFA and PhD programs are still growing or are stabilizing at high numbers, the reality for many writers is that it is still very difficult to find a job.
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Ranking the Writing Programs Best for You

D.W. Fenza | September 2012

For the prospective student, the selection of a writing program is a four-fold choice. First and foremost, it is an artistic choice. Then, it is a financial choice, a professional choice, and a personal choice.
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The Early Days of AWP

Robert Day | September 2012

In the beginning, at the dawn of the 1970s, there was Verlin and Kay Cassill at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
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MA and MFA: The Final Word

John Poch | September 2012

While an MFA in creative writing is considered by most to be the terminal degree for those writers seeking academic training and the rewards thereof, many English departments and writing programs offer an MA in English (magister artium in the Latin) where creative writing can be chosen as a specialization area rather than technical communication, rhetoric/composition, literature, linguistics, or even film.
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Opportunities for Writers: Teaching English Abroad

Alyssa Colton | September 2012

You've completed your degree and are ready to do something different. But you need to earn money, too. Living and working abroad, whether short- or long-term, can be a valuable experience, especially for writers.
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The Tech-Savvy Writer: Embrace Technology, Establish Your Online Presence, and Earn More

Christina Katz | July 2012

The ability to create and maintain a multifaceted, multimedia body of work is one of the most exciting propositions of the new economy we live in—for those who are willing to embrace it.
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Hemingway's Workshop:
What a Writing Program Can Offer You

Alan Cheuse | July 2012

About a dozen years ago, it was the year Jhumpa Lahiri won, I can place it that way-I served as a judge for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. The award ceremony took place in Boston on a windy Sunday afternoon at the John F. Kennedy Library (where the Hemingway papers are stored), a beautiful building near the harbor that gave the appearance of a ship under full sail heading into the wind.
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Picking the Right MFA Program

Joshua Weiner | June 2012

There’s money to consider—tuition (in-state and out of); fellowships and TAships; opportunities to work as a graduate assistant, or in other capacities on campus; cost of living; geography. But the single most important factor is whether or not the respective programs under consideration have writers on staff whose work you admire, and with whom you think, based on their work, you would like to study. That’s really the whole deal. And you want to pick a program that has more than one such writer on the faculty—you’ll only be there for a year or two, or maybe three at most; faculty go on leave every now and then, and sometimes unpredictably (when they score time unexpectedly through fellowships, awards, and other such opportunities).
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The Art of the Fellowship Application

Martha Carlson-Bradley | May 2012

One by-product of receiving a fellowship is that you're likely to be invited to help select new fellows.
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Ghostwriting the Eulogy: How to Make Some Money & Your Name Beyond the Academy

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum | March 2012

These days it seems everyone is talking about the poor academic job market—and for good reason.
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Encountering the Muses: Conversations at the Athens Centre Poetry Workshop, June 2011

Linda Lappin | January 2012

Since the early '70s, the Athens Centre has offered an international poetry workshop every summer , hosting some of the greatest names in American and English poetry: Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, James Merrill. Today the Muses Workshop is conducted by Alicia Stallings, an American poet transplanted to Greece, classics scholar, recipient of the Richard Wilbur poetry prize, acclaimed translator from Ancient and Modern Greek, a Guggenheim fellow, and recently a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship.
In June 2011, as protests and riots over the austerity measures proposed in the Greek Parliament echoed through Constitution Square, I spent a week at the Athens Centre, attending Stallings's workshop. While in Athens, I had an opportunity to speak at length with Rosemary Donnelly, one of the founders of the center and current program director; with A.E. Stallings, poetry workshop leader; and with my fellow participants about this challenging workshop.
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Jumping Ship: Navigating the Waters of Alternative Career Options

For those who always thought they'd be teaching in academia and now are wondering what else they can do

Alyssa Colton | January 2012

One of the most powerful forces that prevent people from seriously considering all of their options is psychological.
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2010-11 Report on the Academic Job Market

Sara Flood | November 2011

In the midst of concern over a prolonged economic recovery, the Modern Language Association (MLA) reported in September that the academic job market stabilized during the 2010-11 academic year.
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Bloom Where You're Planted: Five Steps to Creating a Community Art Project

Nadine Pinede | September 2011

Across the nation, arts funding is in trouble.
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Helping the MFA Cross the Digital Divide

Lisen Stromberg | July 2011

If we think of the writer as the content producer and the publisher as the manufacturer, the final product still needs to find its way into the hands of the end consumer.
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Attention Adjuncts: Get Paid to Research Your Novel! (or: How Teaching Comp Saved My Fiction)

Tyler McMahon | June 2011

Among us writers, there are those stoics who don’t suffer excuses gladly. You know the type. They insist there’s always time to write, even if it’s an hour a day, early in the morning or late at night. After all, isn’t the best art produced under impossible circumstances, despite great odds and after much suffering? Teaching—even a heavy load—beats digging ditches, right?
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Demystifying and Demythifying the Workshop: On the Supposed 'Lore' of Creative Writing Pedagogy

Gerry LaFemina | May 2011

Having spent a good amount of time looking at the issue of creative writing pedagogy, and reading much of the criticism that emanates from both critical scholars and compositionists, I'm left with some frustrations and also some spaces that just might leave me with enough room to place a pry bar of thought into and wiggle an argument open. Much of what is written about the workshop and its relationship to a "lore" of creative writing pedagogy seems to be itself based on some sort of "lore" against creative writing.
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Building a Professional Platform: A Brief Overview

Angela Render | May 2011

Platform is a word that gets tossed around often by agents and editors these days.
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Making the Move to Freelance Copyediting

Bernadette Geyer | March 2011

Although economic indicators point to a recovering economy, jobs for full-time copyeditors may not be high on the list of types of jobs that are being created.
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Editorial Careers in Textbook Publishing

Susan Whalen | December 2010

In the digital world of the 21st century, when immediate communication drives abbreviation of language in text messages, tweets, and e-mails, syntax and grammar are barely an afterthought. However, there are many of us who get unnerved by the lackadaisical, shortened version of phrases like “by the way,” or pronoun misuse when a friend texts “btw will be their soon” to alert us that he or she is running late for dinner.
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Job Seekers Face Historically Weak Academic Job Market

Emily Lu | November 2010

Job openings in English departments sharply declined 40% in the past two years, according to the Modern Language Association, indicating one of the worst job markets in the thirty-five years the organization has been tracking openings.
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How to Prepare Yourself for the Academic Job Market

Natasha Sajé | September 2010

The truism about a PhD being the safer degree may no longer hold true. In the last few years, Paisley Rekdal has seen "the bulk of the tenure-track creative writing jobs go to MFAs, and mostly MFAs with multiple books.
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Toward a Pedagogy of Process for the Creative Writing Classroom

Jenny Dunning | May 2010

As commonplaces in creative writing go, pushing process is likely second only to "show don't tell." Yet we continue to rely on the writing workshop as the default setting in creative writing pedagogy, despite its inherent emphasis on product and the ongoing critique that dates back to the 1980s. I want to ask what it might mean to truly teach process in creative writing, that is as a goal in itself, as a practice, which I believe is the most appropriate emphasis for the undergraduate introductory creative writing course.
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The Unlikely Writer: An Argument for Teaching in Prison

Matt Hudson | March 2010

Imagine the perfect student: eager, full of life experience, willing to commit extensive amounts of time to their writing. Now imagine that student lives thousands of miles away—behind concrete walls and razor wire.
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Curiosity is the Keyword

Molly Fuller Reynolds | January 2010

Whether you are entering the job market due to a recent graduation or a recession- induced layoff, if you find yourself embarking on the dreaded job search, do not despair.
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Creative Writers in the Rare Book Room

Erica Olsen | November 2009

University rare book libraries are often thought of as repositories for dusty old tomes—more dead poets society than a place for living authors. In fact, many rare book libraries house contemporary materials such as literary manuscripts, small press publications, and artists' books. (Within university library systems, rare books and manuscripts are often called "special collections." Manuscripts and personal papers—such as handwritten or typewritten documents, letters, and diaries, as well as digital files—may also be housed in repositories called archives.
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Annual Report on the Academic Job Market 2009

Kristin Lane | November 2009

Across the nation, people are feeling the recession. In nearly every city, industryand demographic, Americans are struggling to maintain the standard of living they enjoyed in the financial heyday of the 1990s and the early 2000s.
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How Writers Can Use Social Networking to Find Jobs

Woody Lewis | August 2009

Social networking is a fundamental human process. The formation of personal and business connections through regular contact with existing and new acquaintances has influenced every civilization in history. In that context, information has been a commodity whose value derives from timeliness as well as content: the faster it’s received, the greater its worth to the recipient.
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"Who Cares" About the "Adjunct Problem"?

P.D. Lesko | May 2009

When the editor of the AWP Job List initially approached me to write a piece about part-time faculty employment, I was delighted. It wasn’t until after I started narrowing down a topic that the realization hit me: who cares?
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The Bashful Writer's Guide to Self-Promotion

Glenn Kurtz | March 2009

You've just delivered the manuscript for your first book to the publisher. Congratulations! Now your work as a writer is done and you can sit back and wait for the royalty checks to roll in.
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Freelancing Through A Recession

Mike Scalise | January 2009

I'm a strong believer in finding a niche. Take a close look at your area of expertise, interests, and hobbies, and go from there. What do you have to offer that will set you apart from other freelancers right now?
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More than Just Mentorship and Modeling: Creative Writers and Pedagogy

Gerry LaFemina | November 2008

While student writers are trying to figure out what it means to be a writer, and graduates of MFA programs have to consider what next, there is another broader question that is being asked in the recent discussions about creative writing pedagogy: what does it mean to be a writer in the academy?
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Economic Crisis Affects Academic Job Market

Emily Lu | November 2008

Higher education is not recession proof. Eighty percent of college students attend public universities, most of whose budgets are being cut because state tax revenues are leveling off or declining.
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The One-Day Gig: Teaching Effectively for Writers' Organizations, Festivals, and Conferences

Martha Carlson-Bradley | September 2008

Leading a one-time class or workshop for a writers’ organization, conference, or festival is a wonderful opportunity: you meet other writers, discuss craft in a meaningful way, hone your teaching skills, add credentials to your résumé, and generate interest in your writing.
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The Teaching Portfolio and Your Academic Job Search

Alyssa Colton | June 2008

Even if you are not yet on the job market, you should start thinking now about constructing a teaching portfolio. The teaching portfolio is increasingly an important part of a job-seeker's package.
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Talking about Teaching as a Job Candidate

James Lang | March 2008

You don't have to be a brilliant teacher to get a faculty job this year—you don't need to have taught dozens of courses, or won teaching awards, or sent students on to win literary prizes and competitions. Even if you have done these things, and you are the most brilliant teacher ever to have danced through the groves of academe, that still won’t guarantee you a job.
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Job Applications Can Do Everything but Fake It

Dedria Humphries | September 2007

There was no putting it off. I needed to start reading the applications for our position. Ever mindful of my back and the long hours I clock sitting at the computer or with a book in my hand, I stood up to my computer on the high desk. At the college’s HR site, I logged into the application queue. Eighty-seven applications waited.
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The Job of Getting a Job in Publishing

John Coyne | May 2007

Castles in the air need solid foundations. Every year graduates of MFA programs, returning Peace Corps Volunteers, and people changing careers decide that publishing is for them!
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How to Get Your First Job as an Editor, Copywriter, or Graphic Designer

Emily Lu | March 2007

You’ve just graduated from an MFA program, and like most recent grads, you’re probably looking for a job that not only makes use of your ability with words but that is also welcoming and satisfying for writers.
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Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript: Some Ideas on Creation and Order

Jeffrey Levine, Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press | January 2007

Beyond style... other advice here concerns more abstract matters: what makes a book a book? How is the artistic process applied to making a poetry manuscript cohere? What are some useful approaches to the art of transforming individual poems into a transcendent whole?
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Report on the 2005-2006 Academic Job Market

Kristin Hahn and Caren Scott | November 2006

The last academic year delivered mixed blessings for job seekers and teachers of English literature and writing. State funding of higher education increased last year, and this thawed hiring freezes in many academic departments; but the good news may not have ameliorated a trend of reduced support for higher education coupled with accelerating rates of inflation.
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Teaching English Online: How to Connect

Amanda Watson Barnett | October 2006

Online learning has often been looked upon with disdain in academia, most likely because of its reputation of being too easy, or a “do it yourself” pedagogy.
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The Telephone Interview

Natasha Sajé | September 2006

If you are looking for a teaching job, you will probably run into an aspect of the interview process that is rarely the subject of job hunting advice, the telephone interview.
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A Strategy for Adjuncts: How to Acquire Classes in the 11th Hour

Thomas Kunz | August 2006

August is here, and by now you’ve either succeeded in securing a few classes or now find yourself stuck in limbo for another semester, assuming that the chance of picking up a few classes this semester is over. You could be wrong.
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Careers in Copyediting: Tips for Creative Writers

Erica Olsen | March 2006

For writers who are looking for job options beyond academia, editorial work can seem like a natural choice. But an MFA in creative writing is not a stepping-stone to an editor’s job any more than it is to a teaching position.
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Surviving the Trip from Adjunct to Professor: How to Keep Writing Through an Overload of Teaching

Sally Shivnan | February 2006

You want to write and you want to teach. The dilemma: to get a tenure track job, or even a position as a visiting professor or full-time lecturer, you must publish, but where is the time to write if you’re scrambling to teach half a dozen classes as an adjunct instructor?
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Surviving the Teaching Demonstration

James M. Lang | January 2006

When Mike Land earned his PhD in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1999, he went on eight on-campus job interviews over the course of two job-hunting seasons. He knew, from his graduate training and from the interviews he had observed for positions in the department at Missouri, that he would be expected to have a job talk to impress his potential future colleagues at on-campus interviews, one that presented either his literary research or his creative work.
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The MLA Job Interview: How to Prepare & What to Expect

Andrea Quarracino | November 2005

The annual convention of the Modern Language Association, to be held December 27–30, 2005 in Washington, DC, has become notorious as "the" site for the academic job interview.
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Annual Report on the Academic Job Market 2005

Andrea Quarracino | October 2005

The number of academic jobs in literature and creative writing increased slightly in the 2004–05 academic year.
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Technical Writing: Growth Industry for Sharp Minds

Woody Lewis | September 2005

The other day I told a neighbor of mine I was looking into technical writing as a career. She didn't know about my ten-year stint as a programmer and systems architect, jobs that required me to continuously document my work in great detail.
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Playing the Numbers Game

Harriet Gordon Getzels | August 2005

The day I sent my manuscript off to five literary agents-agents recommended to me by published authors-I left the post office feeling hopeful, relieved, and a bit -inebriated with thoughts of what might happen next. After seventeen months of full-time writing, I'd completed a narrative nonfiction book proposal and three sample chapters.
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Photos Add $$$: Learn to Include Photos with Your Next Submission

Penny J. Leisch | March 2005

Today, editors want quality writing, great photos, and one-stop shopping. You don't even have to own a camera to submit a great package; yet, two editors I know pass up articles due to the lack of photos every day. Writers take note-if you write travel, news, sports, interviews, crafts, nostalgia, or memoirs, adding photos can secure sales and increase pay.
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Border Crossings

Melissa Kwasny | February 2005

What is a poem and what is prose?
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Travel Writing 101

Susan Miles | February 2005

Travel writing is often characterized as a glamorous profession, appealing to writers and nonwriters alike. Certainly, getting paid to travel, either solo or with friends and family, is a dream job regardless of your previous writing experience.
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Beyond Writing Conferences & Residencies: More Summer Opportunities for Writers who Teach

Erika Dreifus | January 2005

You're reading correctly. This is an article about summer opportunities. Yes, 2005 has barely begun, but already application deadlines for the summer's programs are starting to appear on my calendar, and probably yours too.
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A Report on the Academic Workplace: Opportunities Decline in 2003-04

Kirsten Hilgeford | November 2004

Departments continue to rely heavily on adjunct, nontenure stream, and other “contingent” faculty, so that good, full-time positions remain relatively few.
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Conferring with Others: The Writers Conference Pitch

Amy Holman | October 2004

Hundreds of writers conferences and festivals convene here and abroad each year for a day, a weekend, one or two weeks, offering a wide range of topics and structures of workshops, lectures, and readings to anywhere from 20–300 writers.
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"Commercial" Writing: Good Money, a Flexible Schedule, and the Time to Pursue Your Writing Passions

Peter Bowerman | September 2004

The PR firm had hired me to work on a twelve-page brochure for their client, a local telecomm giant. Source materials were nine one-hour interviews which I then transformed into the same number of one-page profiles plus an intro piece.
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The Art of Conducting E-Interviews

Kamala Thiagarajan | August 2004

We often hear people say that the world has shrunk to a global village. It’s perfectly true, because today, a writer from as far away as Zambia can reasonably expect to get published in any American magazine-even one that deals with specific and local content!
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Fibbers, Nappers, Hens: Grammar and Grading in the Creative Writing Workshop

Julie Schumacher | March 2004

Whenever I teach creative writing to undergraduates, I find time at the very beginning of the semester to hand out a chart to clarify any confusion between lie and lay. The students look surprised when they see it. This is a Creative Writing class, not an "English" class. They haven't signed up for a lesson in grammar.
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Make a List: It's Good for Your Literary Life

Chris Haven | March 2004

You've been good: you've researched the literary journal markets. You've browsed the stacks of the libraries, and made suggestions for acquisitions. You've requested sample issues. Occasionally, you've bought one at the newsstand.
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Carnal Knowledge and the Pedagogy of Poetry Performance

Terry Song | February 2004

When the spotlight came up on the darkened stage at the local music cafe, the air sizzled with expectancy as the young college women took the stage to celebrate the 2003 student literary magazine and perform the poems they had taken care to craft, polishing until their works shimmered and sang. When they stepped up to the mike and opened their mouths to translate the poems from page to the air, they cleared their throats and apologized before reading; they said what a hard act to follow the reader before them was; they shuffled or stammered, spoke too quietly, raced through the poem, swallowed the ends of words, phrases, lines--in essence, dissociated themselves from the work, from their bodies, and unfortunately, from the audience.
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Paying the Rent/Feeding the Soul: Six Writers Discuss Life After the MFA

Camille Dungy | February 2004

If the growing number and increasing competitiveness of first and second book contests is any indication, America 's MFA programs are producing many talented writers every year.
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Writing What We Know... For Love and For Money

Erika Dreifus | January 2004

Early in the book I assign my composition students (and recommend to my fiction writers, too), Richard Marius's A Writer's Companion, the author explains the challenges of the beginning stages of the writing process...
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Working Men and Women: Characters & Their Development

Erika Dreifus | January 2004

Ever notice how much time fiction writers spend focusing on love and love relationships? How many workshop sessions can elapse while the group dissects the plausibility of the lovers' relationship in any given manuscript?
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George Hitchcock: Larger Than Life

Robert McDowell | January 2004

Before I knew him, before I learned that everything about George loomed large, I saw that physically he was big. George Hitchcock, poet-in-residence at what was then College V, the arts cluster college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was crossing the college quad the night I worked up the courage to meet him.
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Seven Tips to Avoid the Slush Pile

L.J. Bothell | January 2004

Publishers get several hundred slush--meaning unsolicited and mostly inappropriate--manuscripts a week. Large book publishing companies find assistants, receptionists, mailroom personnel, and temps reading slush pile manuscripts at Saturday slush parties.
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The Roadmap to Part-time/Full-time Faculty Parity

P.D. Lesko | November 2003

Imagine a higher education system in which part-time faculty who taught just two hours or more would be entitled to pro-rata pay, and that holiday, leave, pension, sick pay, and other benefits extended to full-time faculty would be offered to part-time faculty on a pro-rata basis, as well.
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So You Want To Be a Speechwriter?

Katherine Perry Harris | October 2003

It is, perhaps, every writer's dream to appear in The New Yorker, and Ned Randolph had his chance while serving as a speechwriter for Marc Morial, then mayor of New Orleans. Right before a last minute press conference, Randolph threw together talking points on the gun industry for the mayor, and it was one such 'sound bite' he wrote that later appeared in the magazine.
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Poor Economy Weakens Academic Job Market

Emily Lu | September 2003

Poor Economy Weakens Academic Job Market
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Things MFAs Are Expected to Know But Aren't Taught-and How Knowing Them Might Get You a Job

Beth Ann Fennelly | August 2003

All MFA candidates know that it's hard to get a teaching job after they receive their degrees. With many more qualified applicants than there are openings, entering the job market is a daunting endeavor.
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Why I Am Not (Presently) Working in Academia

J.D. Smith | March 2003

If you read this article aloud, you will hear the pressing of sour grapes. I may as well concede the point and have it done with.
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When No Means Yes: Professors as Objects of Sexual Harassment

Diana Hume George and Christopher Origer | February 2003

Teaching writing invites intimacies less likely to occur in many other disciplines. Our apprentices, whether they’re writing poetry, fiction, or personal essays, often transmute their life experiences into art, and we mediate that transformation.
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So You Want to be a Book Reviewer?

Niki Taylor | January 2003

After analyzing books in college as an English major, I decided book reviewing would be a good way to share my knowledge about books and maybe get paid for it too.
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Independent Publishing (and You?)

Ananya Bhattacharyya | November 2002

A few literary people, in the recent past, have chosen to create new jobs for themselves by establishing a new press or magazine. With more and more people writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, the independent publishing industry plays an important role in bringing this writing to the general population.
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Creative Writers and the Community College

Tim Waggoner | October 2002

During the expansion of the community college system in the 1960s and ’70s, great numbers of faculty were hired. Now, some three decades later, two-year schools are experiencing massive retirements which are expected to continue over the next few years.
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The Recession and the Academic Job Market

Emily Lu | September 2002

Although the Modern Language Association (MLA) reported growth in the number of academic job openings in English in 2001, the academic job market will likely tighten in 2002-03 due in part to the current economic recession.
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How to Give a Good Reading (or, What We Talk About When We Talk About a Good Reading)

Katherine Perry | August 2002

I recently attended a reading by a well-known writer-we'll call him Mr. Long Wind-sponsored by the Midwestern University in my town.
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Good Write, Sweet Prince: Applying at Community Colleges

Meg Files | March 2002

It may be true that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. But I've just read half a zillion applications for one community college position, and many of the applicants looked a lot like royalty, with dreamy vitae listing awards and prizes and honors and publications and degrees and experience.
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Writing Fellowships at Conferences, Colonies, & Centers

Katherine Perry | February 2002

You’re tired of writerly solitude-what now?
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Freelancing

Melissa May | January 2002

Many writers graduating from schools experience a shock upon entering the "real world" where money must be made-and creative writing is often not the way to do it. If you are a member of the 9-to-5 world, there is often not enough time to feed your creative habit. But is there a way to balance your monetary needs with your writerly interests?
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Working in Publishing

Hope Smith | November 2001

It seems natural that writers play a part in publishing. Without writers, publishing wouldn’t exist & without publishers, how would we reach our readers?
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The Challenges of Teaching English Overseas

Supriya Bhatnagar | October 2001

"Expect the unexpected. To my surprise, all the young monks were obsessed with 'My Heart Will Go On,' the Celine Dion song from the movie Titanic. They insisted that I teach them the lyrics, which I did not know. A tape was produced, however, and soon I found myself belting out song lyrics to a classroom of enthralled and highly amused monks."
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Comfort Among Strangers: The On-Campus Teaching Demonstration

Chauna Craig | September 2001

Evaluation is a necessary part of any profession. As writers, our work is evaluated every time we send it out, and as teachers, our work is evaluated primarily by our students.
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A Report on the Academic Job Market

Katherine Perry | August 2001

According to the Modern Language Association (MLA), job openings in English rose by 6% in 2000, from 899 positions in 1999 to 954 positions in 2000.
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Administrative Careers in Higher Education

Liesl Swogger | March 2001

Graduate students spend many years in higher education. But as a grad student, you’re probably in the dark about educational functions that fall outside those of student or instructor.
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Academic Fellowships for Recent Creative Writing Graduates

Katherine Perry | February 2001

You have just earned a graduate degree in creative writing-what next? Perhaps you’re not quite ready to make the transition to a full-time job in the "real world," or you don’t yet have enough teaching experience to find a tenure-track teaching position.
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Seeking a Profession Outside of Academia

Liesl Swogger | January 2001

If you receive this publication, chances are you’re looking for a job. And, given the academic job market, chances are you’re also looking more and more frequently at the Other Opportunities section of the AWP Job List. What if, out of base, financial need, you decide to abandon teaching and actually apply for a job outside of academe?
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Teaching English as a Second Language

Supriya Bhatnagar | November 2000

English as a second language is taught at various levels-elementary, middle, high school, or college. Where you teach depends on your level of education; the more qualified you are, the higher up you go.
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How to Handle Illegal Questions at the Job Interview

Katherine Perry | October 2000

"Do you own your own home? What did your father do for a living? Do you drink alcohol and how often? Do you have a boyfriend?"
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Examining America’s Commitment to Supporting Individual Artists

Jules White | September 2000

For the artist considering whether or not to apply for a grant, and which grant to apply for, the plethora of grants listed in various directories and on the Internet is rather intimidating. But it is also intimidating to note how few grants and opportunities exist for today’s artists.
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Preparing for Your First Full-Time Teaching Position

Nolde Alexius | August 2000

"Does being a good departmental citizen mean holding your tongue, especially when you’re not tenured?" So asks Courtney Leatherman, regarding the seniority system of today’s colleges and universities.
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How to Survive on the Tenure Track

Diana Hume George | March 2000

In English departments, whether in major research universities or small colleges, writers on the tenure track are probably the ones who lie to themselves the most. If you are among them, you are sometimes forced into hypocrisy about what matters most to you.
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How Writers Can Work with Job Recruiters

David Sherwin | February 2000

Can creative writers use recruiters, staffing services, or headhunters to find jobs in the business world? The question comes up often at AWP, as we hear from friends, colleagues, or AWP members.
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How to Succeed as a High-Tech Writer & Editor

David Sherwin with Marlana Patton | January 2000

I recently heard a from an acquaintance who landed a job at Microsoft. While he isn't a writer-his creative impulse is more focused on songwriting-he is truly an artist when it comes to his music, and because of it, Microsoft hired him for his creative savvy.
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Preparing for the MLA Interview

Philip Gerard | November 1999

Preparing for the MLA Interview
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Helping with the Internship Search

Supriya Bhatnagar | October 1999

Helping with the Internship Search
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What Makes an Effective Curriculum Vita

AWP Staff | September 1999

If you are planning to apply for an academic job, you will need to prepare a curriculum vita (CV), which is a listing of your education, publications, grants, awards, teaching experience, and more—in essence, an academic resumé.
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Writing Cover Letters for Academic Jobs

Robin Hemley | August 1999

Fresh out of graduate school at the age of 24, I once applied for the directorship of a prestigious creative writing program. I felt certain they'd hire me, even though I had one short story published in a good-but-obscure literary journal (that transposed the pages of my story, making it incomprehensible).
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