Poetry's big weekend

Scribblings on AWP 2025

The LIT UP! poetry reading event held at The Pico-Union Project, a synagogue-turned-church-turned-synagogue-turned-performing arts-venue. (© Harrison Blackman, 2025)

On March 27, 2025, DTLA was buzzing. Outside Crypto.com Arena (wretch!), the Bob Avakian Communist Cult was handing out leaflets, and thousands of professional bookworms (cue purple sweaters, blue hair, Doc Martens) marched into the LA Convention Center, where they got into a registration line that rivaled the chaos of the TSA checkpoint at Denver International Airport.

The attraction was the AWP25 conference (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), the massive gathering of MFA programs, indie presses, and other literati which attracts more than 12,000 attendees annually. If Sundance is the premier American film festival, AWP is of the same magnitude for poetry and indie literary fiction.

The last AWP I had attended was AWP20 in San Antonio, just a few days before the COVID lockdown put the world on hold for a couple of years. It was precisely that weekend that many would-be conference-goers had cold feet and pulled out from showing up, and the majority of panels and bookfair booths were cancelled. In Texas, we watched the news with baited breath—a man with COVID who had just returned from a cruise ship Petri dish had visited a local indoor mall before falling ill. Patient Texas-Zero. In lieu of the abandoned conference, I found myself aimlessly pacing the San Antonio Riverwalk, one of our nation’s finest tourist traps, complete with its own Rainforest Café and Margaritaville.

Though AWP25 was bustling by comparison, dark clouds had returned to the horizon, as the literary and arts community finds itself in the Trump Administration’s crosshairs.