Yashu Pericherla/The Hofstra Chronicle
As a senior English major, writer and soon-to-be graduate looking for a professional career in the publishing industry, I’ve been on the hunt for events and opportunities to submerge myself fully into the literary field. Thankfully, over spring break, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 2022 AWP Writer’s Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, holds a large, nation-wide conference once a year. The location changes regions every year, with this one being in Philadelphia and the next one being on the west coast in Seattle, Washington. The conference is for anyone interested in the world of writing and books, from readers to students to those who work in the pedagogy of writing: all can gain fruitful knowledge from being an attendee. Between the many wonderful panels offered and the enormous open book fair that spans all three days of the event, AWP is a writer’s dream. Following last year’s successful virtual conference, there continued to be a variety of online programming for people who wanted to attend virtually.
I was first made aware of AWP through Professor Kelly McMasters, director of the publishing studies department here at Hofstra, when she mentioned it at the beginning of the year in her literary publishing course. A writer’s conference was an experience I’d never had, so I did some digging into it and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had a student discount that was both affordable and something I knew I had to take advantage of before I was no longer a student. Professor McMasters was also wonderful enough to talk to some people at Hofstra and pull some strings to help get me a stipend from the English department to go. I also got to do a little Instagram takeover of the event while I was there!
The event took place over three days, from Thursday, March 24, to Saturday, March 26, and it was a blast! The bookfair was so large that it genuinely took me the three days to cover it all. There were publishing imprints, small presses, university presses, online magazines, graduate programs – and any kind of writing-adjacent entity, really! Although I went into this weekend not really thinking about getting a higher degree in writing, there were so many program booths that had brochures for their programs. Some even gave out old issues of their literary magazines. All that is to say, I have a lot more reading to do before dismissing an MFA now!
I also attended a lot of really cool panels over the course of the weekend. One panel of writers that talked about their recent memoirs and how they wrote them in conjunction with their cultural monsters really fascinated me. There was another panel about how to be a woman and write rage in female characters, navigating the tricky line in a patriarchal world of how to depict women expressing emotion without making your readership lose interest or stop taking the character seriously. One panel I was fortunate enough to attend highlighted queer culture in rural areas and how writers from outside a metro-normative world crafted queer narratives based on their own experiences. As a writer who has lived in the Texas suburbs for the majority of their life, as well as living in countries outside the global west, it was nice to hear pieces from writers whose experiences I could see were connected to mine.
My favorite moment of the entire event, however, was a conversation and reading that highlighted authors Dawn Lundy Martin, Deesha Phillyaw and Elizabeth Acevado. They all read pieces from their various novels, all prose-in-verse, and spoke candidly about how their experiences as Black women crafted their works. I’ve been a huge fan of Acevado’s works since I read her book “The Poet X” in high school, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to meet her and have her, Martin and Phillyaw sign my copies of their books.
AWP 2022 was an amazing experience, and I am very grateful to both Professor McMasters and Hofstra for helping me get there. Thank you to my friends Emily and Meghan for coming on this trip with me and sharing in my book nerdiness. This was a unique experience, and I hope to attend next year, too!
