Assistant Professor Jamaica Baldwin took Pete Dorman (’27), Cormac Abbey (’26), Maggie Childers (’26), and Ashan Chandrasena (’26) to the AWP Conference and Book Fair in Baltimore, MD (March 5 to March 8). Students choose from dozens of panels on subjects ranging from teaching pedagogy and writing craft to more urgent, topical concerns, such as AI, climate change, mass migration, social justice, and war. At one session, hosted by YesYes Books, students supported Jamaica as she read from and discussed her poetry collection, Bone Language (2023). Roaming the Baltimore Convention Center, they briefly reunited with our Spring 2026 Distinguished Visiting Writer Kai Coggin, who visited our campus in February as part of the department's Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.
Next year’s conference, the 60th anniversary of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, will be in Chicago, IL (March 17 to 20, 2027). We hope that a new batch of students will have the chance to experience the magical chaos that is AWP.