Houston Writers Take Over DC During AWP
March 10, 2017, by Chelsea DesAutels
This year, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs held its annual conference (AWP) in Washington, D.C. More than 12,000 writers and publishers flooded the city for four days of craft talks, panel presentations, readings, and more. Houston writers represented the best of our city’s expansive literary community. In fact, Houston was so well-represented at AWP it would be impossible to list every event. Instead, I’ll highlight just a few.
Poetry fans packed the house at DC-bar Bayou for a late-night reading hosted by University of Houston-based Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. (Other hosts for the event, called The Magnificent Seven, included AGNI, American Literary Review, Boulevard, cream city review, Pleiades, and PoemoftheWeek.org.) The spirited crowd cheered readings by Chen Chen, Alice Elliott Dark, Matt Donovan, David Keplinger, Shara McCallum, Gregory Pardlo, Caitlin Pryor, Maggie Smith, and Ryo Yamaguchi. Gulf Coast also held down a table at the book fair throughout AWP, and presented Gulf Coast: 30 Years in the Life of a Student-Run Journal, a dialogue with several past journal editors. Continue reading