The Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference (better known as AWP) was held in Los Angeles this year, and if you’ve been keeping up with us here, you know that we were thrilled to bring a bit of UNCW to the West Coast. It’s my third year as a UNCW MFA candidate and my third AWP, and I was thrilled to help represent our literary imprints, including Ecotone and Lookout Books. I’m on Ecotone’s design team and started working as an intern with Lookout last spring. I returned to Lookout’s practicum for my final MFA semester to support Bernardo Wade’s forthcoming poetry collection, A Love Tap, and to assist in the acquisitions process for future Lookout titles.
With such a wealth of options when it comes to panels, bookfair offerings, and off-site events, AWP can be a bit overwhelming. I’m always grateful to have the UNCW table as my home base. When I arrived at the bookfair on the first morning, it was already bustling—with a full display of Lookout titles (including signed copies of Cameron Dezen-Hammon’s This Is My Body) and issues of the department’s journals, Chautauqua and Ecotone. The latest Ecotone was available, as were broadsides designed in the Publishing Lab to honor Ecotone’s twentieth anniversary. AWP always offers a great opportunity to connect with the authors we’ve had the honor of publishing.
I spent most of the first day making the rounds at the bookfair, before heading to the panel Nonfiction as a Poem, Photograph, Song, or Fable, which featured former UNCW visiting writer and Ecotone and Lookout Books contributor Aisha Sabatini Sloan. I had the honor of taking Aisha’s essay-as-archive workshop, so it was wonderful to catch up with her and hear her discuss formal experimentation in nonfiction with other boundary-breaking writers.
That evening, I attended an off-site reading in Silverlake hosted by indie literary journal Rejection Letters and small press House of Vlad. This rowdy, DIY-spirited reading shone a light on lots of zany, genre-amorphous prose. Throughout the week, I was consistently inspired by the presence of indie presses at the conference and publishing work I might not have been familiar with otherwise.
The next day I attended two more readings. The first was hosted by the Sewanee Review and Swing Magazine in a Little Tokyo gallery and kicked off with prose by none other than my friend and fellow third-year MFA candidate Kyle Alderdice. After that reading, I ran back downtown to attend the Fourth Genre reading on a hotel rooftop, where I got to hear the work of talented essayists, including friend, MFA second-year, and Ecotone nonfiction editor Marah Hoffmann.
On my third day of AWP, I attended a panel titled Beyond Anthropomorphism: Reimagining Animals in Literature, affectionately referred to by its speakers as “the panimal.” I’d previously met Erica Berry, panelist and author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, when she was a guest at UNCW’s Writers’ Week in 2023, so it was great to hear her discuss the nuances of writing the non-human world. UNCW is lucky to welcome Erica back to campus in the fall of 2025 as a visiting faculty member.
I had a wonderful time working the closing shift at the bookfair table, talking about our journals, imprint, and MFA program with other attendees. The submission info cards for Lookout and Ecotone were gone by the time my shift started, an auspicious ending to a conference that left me feeling excited for all the literary discoveries to come.
