Students, Alum Flock to Baltimore Convention Center for Writing Conference

Country's largest literary arts convention sees over 10,000 each year, including dozens from Washington College

It was like a family reunion, community celebration, and professional conference all rolled into one at the Baltimore Convention Center for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference this year.

Every year, AWP lands in a different city across the country, bringing with it over 10,000 attendees. Among those thousands every year are not only the literary giants, agents, presses, and master’s programs one would expect at the premier  professional writing conference in the country, but also dozens of students and alum of Washington College.

The Washington College Rose O’Neill Literary House has a booth at the AWP book fair every year and takes four student interns to man it. They work in shifts to sell Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College and explain its submission guidelines. They also sell the letterpress broadsides designed and printed on campus at the print shop and connect attendees with the Lit House Press and its anthologies.

This year, Lit House took four first-time AWP attendees: Andraya Sudler ’26, Jessica Kelso ’27, Siobhan Luckey ’27, and Leo De Luca ’28.

“It’s always a pleasure to take our students to AWP. They are usually already familiar with the structure of literary readings and panels through our events at the Lit House, but it’s their first time seeing it at that scale, and coming to terms with just how many thousands of people across this country are still wildly invested in the importance of things written and read by other humans,” said Roy Kesey ’91 P’26, associate director of the Lit House. “It can be overwhelming at first, but the students come to see the size and intensity of the conference as a testimony to the enduring importance of the art and community of the written word.”

The conference spans three days and features over 315 events—including panel discussions, readings, conversations on genre and community engagement, and more—and the largest literary marketplace in North America. The bookfair is the heart of the conference and includes hundreds of exhibitors from small presses, literary magazines, university presses, Master of Fine Arts programs in writing, and more.

For Kelso, the bookfair was her favorite part of the conference.

“I like being at the bookfair because it’s more personable than the readings,” she said. While she appreciated the panels, she said the bookfair provided more opportunity for conversation and to meet people.

De Luca took advantage of the bookfair to purchase a new book by poet Robert Lynn Wood, whose work he discovered in a poetry workshop he took last spring. Wood, who also attended AWP, even signed De Luca’s copy.

Sudler loved the offsite readings, she said, because they gave her an opportunity to explore Baltimore and better get to know her Cherry Tree intern peers.

“I was originally very nervous about going to AWP. Having never been before, I didn’t know what to expect from the conference,” Sudler said. “But after experiencing the joint Moon Jelly reading on Wednesday evening, I felt more comfortable surrounded by other lovers of literature.”

Lit House is not the only Washington organization to take students to AWP; Collegian and Writers’ Union have also taken students for several years. This year’s Baltimore location also provided unprecedented access for Washington students to attend the conference themselves, either for the full conference or the final day, which has a discounted rate.

“It’s so rare that undergraduates get to attend, which I’ve always found a little bit ridiculous—no one benefits from such an unflinching, reassuring promise of community like those who haven’t quite discovered their place in it.”

— Sophie Foster '24

Among the students to take advantage of the conference location was Melinda Kern ’26, who said a highlight for her was a panel she attended on translation. Kern completed an independent study with English professor Courtney Rydel on Anglo-Saxon translations to English, something that will feature in her Sophie Kerr portfolio submission, and she attended the panel to hear from professionals that do that work.

Justin Nash ’21, center coordinator at the Lit House, has attended all but one AWP conference since his freshman year of college in 2018. Through past years at the conference, he discovered summer internship opportunities, the MFA program he’d eventually attend, and lifelong friends who started as strangers he bumped into at poetry readings.

“I love so much that we get to bring students along for the work we do, and it’s endlessly rewarding to be on the other side now and watching them light up and develop new senses of possibility the way I did years ago,” Nash said. “In some ways, AWP defined my undergrad experience. It was the thing I looked forward to every year. Being able to attend as a student with the Lit House exposed me to a new horizon of what writerly life could look like and placed every opportunity I could want squarely in front of me.”

The Cherry Tree booth served not only as a way to get the word out about the journal; it was also a homing beacon for dozens of Washington alum who stopped by to say “hi” to Lit House staff, reminisce on their time at the College, and, most often, run into other alum seeking to do the same.

Tamia Williams ’21 first attended AWP in 2019 as a student intern for the Lit House. While Williams always admired trailblazing writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, that first conference gave her the opportunity “to meet living writers of color, listen to their creative processes, and see how they navigate the complexities of modern America through their work.”

“Now, four conferences later, I’m still inspired by the passion and honesty writers bring to their craft. This year was especially meaningful as the Baltimore location meant several Washington alumni gathered for the SLACC Moon Jelly reading, which allowed us to reconnect as a community,” Williams said. “I’m grateful to the Lit House for opening the door to an experience that continues to inspire my writing.”

Sophie Foster ’24 has attended five AWPs, some with Lit House and some with Writers’ Union. Now pursuing an MFA in poetry at UMass Boston, Foster said she was the only one in her cohort who had ever been to the conference.

“It’s so rare that undergraduates get to attend, which I’ve always found a little bit ridiculous—no one benefits from such an unflinching, reassuring promise of community like those who haven’t quite discovered their place in it yet,” Foster said.

For Foster, the writing community—and her certainty of her place in it—came from that early exposure to AWP, which supported her through MFA applications, submitting her work to journals, and knowing she had a future and career in the writing world.

“There are so often wonderful, enriching experiences that don’t register as pivotal until after the fact, but this is not one of those things; it registered then, and continues to register now, as such an enormous, rare privilege to have access that early in life to such a vast wealth of literary knowledge and creative life,” Foster said. “On a personal level, of course the enduring relationships I’ve built and enthusiasms I’ve discovered thanks to AWP—and Washington College—are things I will always be immeasurably grateful for. On a professional level, though, the opportunities I had to network, learn, gather resources, and experiment creatively at such a young age are completely irreplaceable.”

—MacKenzie Brady ’21