Weird Lit Mag is headed to Los Angeles later this month for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and Bookfair! Since 1967, AWP has worked to “amplify the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing.” Thousands of visitors flock to AWP’s three-day conference each year, attending an impressive list of talks and panels given by authors, editors, and publishers—the WLM crew will be going to a lot of these.
Additionally, AWP hosts booksellers, literary magazines, and other publishing professionals at the Bookfair, where vendors display their offerings. Here writers, publishers, students, teachers, and anyone else interested in the publishing world mingle and bond over literary passions and pursuits.
Weird Lit Mag will be setting up shop at table # 927, and we are pumped to meet and chat with everyone who stops by. We’ve been checking out the floor map to see who our neighbors are going to be. Like plane rides or coworkers in an office, you don’t really get to pick who’s going to be next to you, but we’re excited about everyone nearby.
To our left is an Iowa City-based (home of my alma mater The University of Iowa) magazine called Annulet. They publish poetry, prose, and literary criticism and are interested in pieces that take special care with the structure and form of their sentences. I read through the latest issue and found some lovely freeform poems. To our right is Aunt Lute Books (another publisher with roots in Iowa City; what can this mean?) who’ve been around since 1982 and specialize in intersectional feminist works. Across from us is the big-name Chicago Quarterly Review. They’ve been printing fantastic fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and black and white photos for thirty years. In the immediate vicinity are Riot in Your Throat, a feminist poetry press; River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, which is what it says on the tin, really; and Silly Goose Press, a delightful literary magazine full of whimsical poems and fiction.
Quite the eclectic crew, and that’s only one small corner of the Bookfair—there will be hundreds of other journals, presses, and literary organizations there. We hope to make lots of new friends with our neighbors and passersby. See you in Los Angeles!
AWP 2025 will be March 26-29, 2025 at the LA Convention Center. Find us at table # 927, where we’ll have some cool WLM swag (some of which is handmade!), physical versions of our issues’ cover art for your viewing pleasure, (good)weird vibes, high fives, and of course, our friendly faces.
Not coming to the conference this year? Stay tuned for our soon-to-launch Spring 2025 Issue, arriving at weirdlitmag.com on the equinox, March 20, 2025.