Featured Events
#AWP25 Keynote Address with Roxane Gay
Thursday, March 27, 8:00–10:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Roxane Gay is an author and cultural critic whose writing is unmatched and widely revered. Her work garners international acclaim for its reflective, no-holds-barred exploration of feminism and social criticism. With a deft eye on modern culture, she brilliantly critiques its ebb and flow with both wit and ferocity.
Words like “courage,” “humor,” and “smart” are frequently deployed when describing Gay. Her collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is universally considered the quintessential exploration of modern feminism. NPR named it one of the best books of the year, and Salon declared the book “trailblazing.” Her powerful debut novel, An Untamed State, was longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. In 2017, Gay released her bestselling memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, which was called “Luminous. . . . intellectually rigorous and deeply moving” by The New York Times. She also released her collection of short stories, Difficult Women. The Los Angeles Times says of the collection, “There’s a distinct echo of Angela Carter or Helen Oyeyemi at play; dark fables and twisted morality tales sit alongside the contemporary and the realistic.”
Read Roxane Gay’s full bio.
Stay tuned for more events coming soon!
National Jewish Book Award Poetry Reading & Conversation
Thursday, March 27, 12:10–1:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Five poets whose books have been honored by the National Jewish Book Awards come together to read from their collections and discuss what it means to write on Jewish themes today. The poets reflect on their writing relationships with Jewish histories, joy, trauma, and political injustices and brutalities. The reading includes both winners and finalists of the National Jewish Book Award in the category of poetry between 2018 and 2023.
Writing Toward Community, Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts & Anaphora Literary Arts
Thursday, March 27, 1:45–3:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
To be a member of any community is to be held in tension between familiarity and isolation, between unity and individuality. Join these three artists as they continue the work of their poetry, fiction, film, and organizing work in navigating this tension, finding space for new connections and community to flourish—networks sustained by art and honesty, built for all of us still seeking our place. Blue Flower Arts and Anaphora Literary Arts are proud to present readings by Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, and Ladan Osman followed by rich conversation moderated by poet Mahtem Shiferraw, founder and executive director of Anaphora Literary Arts.
Read presenters’ full bios.
Queering Form, or Weird Fiction, Sponsored by the Center for Fiction
Thursday, March 27, 1:45–3:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Writing fiction is finding your way to something true. What if you were permitted to abolish the binaries, break every rule you were given in workshop, and dare to be as weird as your story demands? Join us for a discussion of what it means to make form work for your story, and how to find readers and editors who will help you realize your highest ambitions and imaginings.
Read the panelists’ bios.
Nurturing a Green Heart: Staying Soft in the Face of Adversity, Sponsored by Alice James Books
Thursday, March 27, 3:20–4:35 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Read presenters’ full bios.
Rich Benjamin & Sloane Crosley in Conversation with Amelia Possanza, Sponsored by the Authors Guild
Thursday, March 27, 3:20–4:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
How do writers fill absences? Great literature is often created when the author writes the book only they can write—the book they want to read but that does not yet exist. Rich Benjamin is the author of the award-winning Searching for Whitopia and, most recently, Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History, a grandson’s account of the coup that ended his grandfather’s presidency of Haiti. Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestselling books Grief Is for People, How Did You Get This Number, and I Was Told There’d Be Cake, as well as Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the novels Cult Classic and The Clasp. Benjamin and Crosley will read from their work, followed by conversation with Amelia Possanza, book publicist and Lambda Award–winning author of Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives.
Read presenters' full bios.
Black Words Are Black Wealth: A Lecture by Tayari Jones, Sponsored by IngramSpark
Friday, March 28, 9:00–10:15 a.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
HBCUs have long been the incubator for African American literature, and also for robust debate. The gift of self-definition is the true endowment of our institutions. This lecture discusses this long legacy and also the route forward for Black writers who come of age at HBCUs—as students and as faculty members. This is about how we honor our proud past as we shape our meaningful and consequential future.
Read the HBCU Creative Advisor's bio.
Big Ideas, Short Forms: Sarabande Writers on the Art & Craft of the Short Form
Friday, March 28, 10:35–11:50 a.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
As a publisher of hybrid works, chapbooks, novels in stories, and experimental prose, Sarabande has championed the short form for more than three decades! Here, four nationally acclaimed writers will present and discuss original short form works of various genres, including poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. They will address structure, density, beginnings and endings, sudden moves, white space, and other tools in the short form writer's toolbox.
Read the presenters' bios.
NBF Presents: Page to Screen
Friday, March 28 12:10-1:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
What is the relationship between writing for the page and for the screen? Join National Book Award–honored authors Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, 2014 fiction finalist) and Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown, 2020 fiction winner) for a conversation on what it means to have your work adapted for film and TV, and the many different professional hats worn by contemporary writers. Moderated by Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation.
Read presenters' full bios.
Nightboat Books Through the Ages: A Twentieth Anniversary Reading
Friday, March 28, 12:10–1:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Over the last two decades, Nightboat Books has developed audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, publishing more than two hundred books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. To celebrate, a constellation of our authors—Dawn Lundy Martin, Brandon Som, Brian Teare, and Jackie Wang—together with our cofounder Kazim Ali, will read from their work as well as texts by other beloved Nightboat authors, from Etel Adnan and Fanny Howe to Assotto Saint and Lou Sullivan.
Like a Hammer: Poets On Mass Incarceration Book Launch, Sponsored by the University of Arizona Poetry Center
Friday, March 28, 1:45-3:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Join us for launch reading of Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America’s carceral system. These powerful poems of witness address the oppressive systems that define the U.S. prison-industrial complex, exposing cracks in a criminal justice system that often feels unchangeable. The impact of this system reverberates across generations. The poets gathered here foreground the real experiences of those affected, challenging dominant narratives, exposing injustice, and serving as a fulcrum for organizing communities. Like a Hammer explores how art and imagination can be vehicles for endurance, offering hope to envision a better future.
Read the panelists' full bios.
The Vacancies We Name: Poetry of Global Perspectives, Sponsored by Copper Canyon Press
Friday, March 28, 3:20–4:35 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
When we leave home and move through the world, what vacancies get created inside us? What does it mean to be severed from belonging—and to find it again? And how does poetry give us a mouth with which to tune our empty spaces? In this reading, three celebrated, international poets explore the intersections between distance, home, and spirit, offering a window into the energies we use to make a place in which we can live, whether here, there, or both at once.
Read presenters’ full bios.
NBCC Fiftieth Anniversary: All-Stars Breaking New Ground in Fiction
Friday, March 28 3:20-4:45 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
A special 50th anniversary literary partner National Book Critics Circle featured reading at the 2025 AWP conference in Los Angeles, with all-star fiction writers Jonathan Escoffery, Jonathan Lethem and Justin Torres, three authors honored as NBCC finalists or award winners, whose work is breaking new ground. Readings and conversation, moderated by NBCC president Heather Scott Partington, will cover inspiration, research, influences on their work, writing in these times, and evolving forms.
Read presenters' full bios.
Emergence & Becoming: Framing Native Poetics Beyond the “Renaissance”
Saturday, March 29 9:00-10:15 a.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
The term “Native American Renaissance” has long been used to describe the surge of Native literary production in the 1960s and ’70s. However, this label risks implying that Native literature lacked sophistication or vitality prior to this moment. Drawing from Diné poetics and cultural frameworks, we’ll examine how these ideas illuminate the continuity and innovation of Native storytelling traditions, offering a more expansive understanding of Native literature’s past, present, and future.
Read the presenter's bio.
Our People Shall Live: Mizna Gathers Suheir Hammad & Mosab Abu Toha in Conversation
Saturday, March 29 10:35-11:50 a.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
As we mourn the Gazan lives, communities, and infrastructure destroyed by escalating Zionist genocide, Mizna hosts an intergenerational conversation of Palestinian poets: Def Poetry legend Suheir Hammad and acclaimed Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha. The poets will read new work responding to our ongoing catastrophe and engage in conversation on Palestinian steadfastness, literature’s role in resisting genocide, and our collective futures in and beyond the world of poetry.
Poetry of the West with Red Hen Press
Saturday, March 29 12:10-1:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Will Alexander, Peggy Shumaker, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Harryette Mullen: We feasted, we cried, we wept for our ancestors, and for the ancestors who lived on these lands and for our children, and we wrote the poetry of remembrance and laughter and forgetting and of writing new stories. The narrative of the West is being rewritten by these poets. We write ourselves into a new story.
Read our presenters' full bios.
Poet Leaders: A Letras Latinas Reading & Discussion
Saturday, March 29, 1:45–3:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
How do you maintain an artistic practice while being in a leadership role like poetry editor at a publisher, founder of a literary journal, executive director, or senior poetry consultant for a major poetry festival? Three poets share their experiences as literary citizens and leaders. Opening with a reading of their work, they will then participate in a conversation about their varied roles championing literature, challenges they faced, and ways to get involved in the literary community.
