Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 3

A tribute to Gianna and Kobe Bryant outside the LA Convention Center.

Last of a three-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

On Day 3 of the conference, I was starting to experience cognitive overload, a condition many attendees have commented on. Normally we writers spend most of our time alone, and when we socialize, it tends to be in small groups. The energy of the first couple of days that had so charmed me at first, with crowds of people surging through the halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center and those occasional delightful moments where I recognized someone, were beginning to wear me out. Nevertheless, I managed to attend two panels that day, before spending several hours walking through the Bookfair.

The first panel of Day 3, “Future Forms: Inventing Literary Forms for the Twenty-First Century”
(Kai Carlson-Wee, Kate Folk, Alexandria Hall, Keith Wilson, Hua Xi) was a wonderfully creative and eccentric take on poetic forms. In fact, the moderator, Kai Carlson-Wee, termed it “the spirit of the weird,” which I resonated with immediately (I’m always urging my students to get weirder in their poetry). Forms shared included the “palindrome poem” (watch this poetry film based on Carlson-Wee’s poem “Nomad Palindrome”), “Magic Eye” or the stereogram, where if you stared hard enough and in just the right way, a poem would rise from a block of text (like the Magic Eye posters), a poem written completely in symbols which captures what it feels like to have a psychotic break, and some text-based pieces from Kate Folk and Alexandria Hall. 

I gave this panel high marks for its fearless and imaginative transformation of forms, for the energy of the panelists (especially for an early-morning, last-day panel), and for the fun they managed to inject into a category that includes traditional forms such as ballads and sonnets.

My final panel of the conference was “The Black Ekphrastic Mode” (Elontra Hall, Nick Makoha, Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker). This panel grew out of an awareness that several Black writers, who were living and working in the UK, had when they realized they were all simultaneously writing in response to art. The panel asked the questions, what does it mean to look at art through a state of active consciousness? And, what does it mean to work through mythologies when your history has not been recorded? They spoke of the African diaspora, and how each writer learned from the artists they wrote about, a process Malaika Booker expressed as “write / abandon / come back / show to friends / rewrite.”

These writers were conscious that their work was in conversation with a legacy of colonialism. Booker pointed out that during slavery, a special “slave Bible” redacted passages about Exodus. She also had this to say about cultural appropriation, a hot-button issue for many writers today: “I challenge the term ‘appropriation.’ Imagination is free. Do it with integrity. All literature is a re-working of ancient stories, for example, all superheroes are based on timeless legends.”

And finally, the last sentence in my notebook comes from Booker and refers to the long lists of begets and begats included in the Bible: “How does one beget without a womb?”

After this last panel, we ventured into the Bookfair. Thinking of the stacks back home, I didn’t grab as many books as I have at previous AWP conferences. Instead, I concentrated on saying hello to as many people as possible, including Stephanie G’Schwind from Colorado Review, Rebecca Hart Olander from Perugia Press, with an unexpected and happy introduction to Carolina Hotchandani, whose wonderful collection, The Book Eaters, I reviewed in the December 2024 issue of Sticks & Stones, and the crew from Sugar House Review. Feeling impending exhaustion, I ended my foray through the aisles, grabbed some lunch, and headed back to the hotel.

A quibble: I heartily wish AWP would offer a printed conference guide, like they did until 2023. Using the online version, a PDF in the exact same format as the printed book, is awkward–searching through a 175-page PDF is, to say the least, a slog. If an online version is the only option, then at least make it searchable. There is a “print-at-home” schedule, but when printed, it comes out with the pages flipped, just another little irritant.

But overall, this was a very good AWP.

Did you attend the 2025 AWP? Please share in the comments. Thank you!