2002: New Orleans

My first AWP was a road trip with other cream city review editors from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Creative Writing Program. We rented an entire house in New Orleans that had three suites off of N. Rampart. The party included: Jayson Iwen, Stephen McCabe, Oody Petty, Stephen Powers, Aimee Rust, Joanne Staudacher, Erica Wiest, me, and my husband, Jim Heagy. Maurice Kilwein Guevara was on the AWP Board, and he gave me two tickets to a private party at which Ernest Gaines would be present. I’d read A Lesson Before Dying, never dreaming I would meet the author. I wore a pink wig and sat down next to him. We had a brief talk, and I had to admit I’d skipped the keynote to wander around New Orleans. A concerned handler approached and asked Gaines, “Is she bothering you?” He said no, not at all. RIP, Ernest Gaines. You are memorialized on a postage stamp and your words still sustain us.

2003: Baltimore

I screwed up our flights (Ryder Jones, née Collins, and myself) and we had to take a taxi to Baltimore from Dulles. It was gray and rainy the entire conference. There was a party in a penthouse, and an asshole criticized the thrift store vest I was wearing, saying I should never wear it again. I met several poets and writers, but I don’t want to drop names.

2004: Chicago, Palmer House

The panels were in small rooms, and I could never get a seat. We went to Russian Tea Time almost every day. I discovered horseradish vodka.

2005: Vancouver

Rainy. Starbucks on every corner. Stunning architecture. As usual, I worked at the cream city review table at the book fair. I wore black biker boots, a black dress, and a black leather jacket to a party, and received quite a few compliments. I also wore a bright green fleece the same night Ryder wore an orange sweater. Someone remarked we were opposites on the color wheel.

2006: Austin

Keep Austin weird! A long, hours-long, road trip from Milwaukee with Ryder and Phong Nguyen, editor-in-chief of cream city review, in a van full of writers, luggage, and books. Austin had really good restaurants. Amazing live music, including a bass player that lit up my world. Dancing. I met Rayne Arroyo and he put me in a poem! (I seriously didn’t know you could do that, how unstudied was I?) A hellish road trip home because Ryder was sick, and everyone was sleepy.

2007: Atlanta

Another road trip with Ryder and the poet Joe Radke along. We walked to Centennial Olympic Park, where there was a terrorist bomb threat during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Lots of sunshine and good ramen.

2008: New York, Jan. 30, not my best conference

2009: Chicago, my birthday, absinthe

2010: Denver, a big blue bear held up the conference center

2011: Washington, DC, my first Nigerian food

2012: Chicago, the first time Kestrel had its own bookfair table, and we gave away shots of Jameson to people who bought Ryder’s book, Homegirl!

2013: Boston, snow and oysters

2014: Seattle, met Lisa Lanser Rose and some other writers associated with Anhinga Press

2015: Minneapolis, sat outside on a round concrete bench and reveled in the unusually warm weather

2016: Los Angeles, Staples Center, and a day trip to the Huntington where I saw Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting

2017: Washington, DC, participated in a candle-light peace and freedom vigil outside the White House where some amazing poets were speakers

2018: Tampa, met a man in an elevator

2019: Portland, visited my first recreational dispensary and plan to write about cannabis tourism in the future

2020: San Antonio, yikes, just before the pandemic, the bookfair half-empty and pop-up panels occupying the rooms

2021: Virtual

2022: Philadelphia, a #1 city, imho

2023: Seattle, lots of hills, not enough eateries, roomed with a great intern, who is now my housemate for a year while they work on a master’s degree in library science

2024: Kansas City

After twenty years of attending, I’ve come to expect very little from AWP Conferences. The best part is being alone without an overscheduled agenda and engaging in spontaneous conversations.

In Kansas City, I worked a few hours at the Kestrel table at the bookfair. I crossed paths with dozens of other language lovers I’m acquainted with, some also AWP frequent flyers. This year, I looked up other UWM alum and said, hey. I sat in on a couple of rocking panels, one called, “Slackers, Stoners, and Screw-Ups: APIA Writers on the Margins of the Margins,” where the idea of “bad Asians” was tossed around. The other panel, “Should I Just Give Up?” focused on writing projects that we work on for a decade and longer. The panelists included Jackie Cuevas, Anel Flores, Michelle Otero, and Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, Chicana/x poets, writers, and professors, who worked on projects for years before arriving at publication. If I’m going to shout out a press at this year’s conference, it’s Alternating Current Press, because they make the most beautiful books with elegant colophons and have been offering books at AWP Conferences for seventeen years.

On my own, I scouted the “dispensary near me” and walked half-a-mile to the From the Earth Dispensary Downtown for research purposes. The salesclerk said it was okay to take pictures inside. I bought a disposable vape. I have now visited weed dispensaries in eight states.  

Other conference highlights include a reading at Prospero Bookstore, a gem of a place, hosted by Justin Hamm, with a line-up of poets that were out of this world, all featured on poet trading cards produced by Hamm with the support of the Osage Arts Community. The readings were raucous, moving, and vibrant. I’d do it all over again if I could. Poet trading cards are available online.

The food at and near the conference was meh. The final night, we took a chance on Eddie V’s  Prime Seafood, the swankiest place I’ve ever had dinner. We only ended up there because every other restaurant we called was booked. Eddie V’s provided a fine dining experience like something out of The Bear. Invisible waiters swept in to sweep away crumbs and fill our water glasses. I had scotch on the rocks, three kinds of oysters, and filet medallions Oscar style. Every scrap and sip were delicious. The bill for two was almost three hundred dollars. It was a once in a lifetime experience.

No doubt attending AWP Conferences is expensive, even for those with modest funding. The conferences are held in urban centers, often in downtown/high rise districts, with infrastructure that can handle ten-thousand conference goers at once, in addition to other visitors and locals. The weather in Kansas City was dry, windy, mostly sunny, and I didn’t meet any homeless people until I walked toward the dispensary. Around the three or four block mark, unsheltered people began to appear, sitting under awnings, bundled up, with bags of belongings beside them. One guy with a red beard and a backpack asked for money to eat, and I said, “I don’t have anything to give you right now. I hope you get fed.” He said thanks and moved across the street to ask someone else.

Later that night, at the hotel, a single nervous homeless guy came around. I made up for my earlier stinginess by giving him a cigarette and a twenty, enough to send him on his way before he got into trouble with hotel security. The surprising thing is that I’m able to find homeless people when I look for them. They’re in every town and city in America, the wealthiest nation on the planet. I admire cities that provide services for our most disenfranchised citizens and judge the ones that don’t. At AWP in Philadelphia, a student group rolled up every day next to the conference center to distribute brown bag lunches.

The conference this year, for me, had a heightened political sensibility, rough and smooth, witnessed and reported moments, language lovers free to draw lines in the sand without more than minor hostilities. A lot of issues are at stake in our terrible, beautiful world. I hardly need to list them. I feel thankful to have witnessed and felt the passion of language lovers who speak up about things that matter.

For the first time, I stayed to pack up and close down the bookfair table this year. The crowd was thin around 4 o’clock on Saturday afternoon. I left the table to other editors and dipped out for fresh air and a smoke, which required an indoor hike of a couple blocks, until I reached the outside where around the corner, concrete steps were populated like bleachers with other defectors.

I sat next to a handrail so I could pull myself easily back up and not fall down the stairs and crack my head like my aunt did when she was on a Jehovah Witness mission trip in Bali and fell down the stairs in her lodging.

The younger person on the other side of the railing looked up, and I explained the situation.

They laughed, and we started talking, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I can’t really track the conversation in retrospect because it would be like following a perfect table tennis game that lasted more than a half hour, but it touched upon belief, God, family, worst endings in literature, weed and smoking in public, dog lovers, cities we’d visited, poetry, and where the dispensary was located. In the meantime, we shared a joint, and no one batted an eye, not even the convention center worker who swept up cigarette butts from the steps around us. Before I went back in to help close down the bookfair table, we exchanged names. They went by Breezy and gave me their card. It was a spontaneous conversation of the best quality, and one of the reasons I keep returning to AWP Conferences.