Sherry Chandler

AWP

Poet Diane Lockward reports from the AWP meeting in New York City where she has been minding the shared table for Wind Publications and Steel Toe Books, both Kentucky enterprises

I have now attended my first AWP Conference. My spouse drove me in Wednesday afternoon and deposited me at the Hilton Hotel where I would spend an absurd amount of money for a rather small room, nice but smallish. That night I had a BLT for dinner—$17.50! Then I discovered that the hotel charges $15 per day for use of their wireless. That was another first. That’s usually an amenity that comes with the room rate. But I had my new laptop with me and was determined to put it to use.

The next day I reported for duty at the book table my publisher, Wind Publications, was sharing with Steel Toe Books. Tom Hunley, the Steel Toe publisher as well as a Wind poet, had the table already set up. Our location was a nice corner spot, but on the second floor of the Bookfair. As that area required one to go up an escalator and there was no sign indicating the second level, there was much less traffic in that area. I sold a decent number of books, but I heard a lot of grousing about diminished sales this year in spite of the dramatic increase in the number of registrants. My guess is that with the exorbitant hotel costs people were less inclined to shell out for books.

Diane also attended the launch of the Wom-Po anthology Letters to the World, published by Red Hen Press:

My favorite event was the Wompo panel Friday morning. This was a celebration of the just-released Wompo anthology, Letters to the World, which contains over 200 poems by members of the Wompo listserv. It was an amazing and time-consuming and international endeavor. The result is a gorgeous anthology.

Several local poets have poems in this anthology, including me, Joanie DiMartino, Ann Lederer, and Margaret Ricketts. More about it later.

Addendum: Meredith Sue Willis also has an AWP experience to report:

I suppose, especially in New York, so many people go! 7,000 participants, and they had to close registration– at once a wonderful feeling, all those people who care about books and writing– that what we do is serious, and at the same time the horror, the horror: they all want to be writers? And who will be reading what they write? Young people from the programs, fragrant with ambition, old people with twisted mouths, self-involved, not having achieved all they wanted, ready to talk about themselves, not others. Double and tripling of exhilaration and dismay.

1. The Eclectic Living Room
2. Steel Toe Books and Writer’s Almanac
3. Steel Toe Open Reading
4. Charlie Hughes
5. Odyssey Books

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