The bar in the Crossroads Arts District is at capacity. Servers bustle hurriedly amongst the standing room crowd. Those who arrived late are out of luck. The people in the bar aren’t there because the hometown team plays in the Super Bowl in a few days. In fact, most of them aren’t even from Kansas City. They’ve gathered in this space, with its sharpie-signed walls and its painted ceiling tiles and not enough chairs, for a pre-AWP tradition: the 11th Annual Rock & Roll Reading, sponsored by the K-State English Department.
Readers offer up lobster love poems (the inimitable Traci Brimhall) or verses about rock & roll dudebros, and have the raucous crowd of writers alternately laughing or in appreciative awe. There are poets laureate; singalongs to Radiohead’s “Creep;” exclamations of excitement when old friends reunite. At the microphone, Megan Kaminsky comments that it’s like she’s walked through a portal. Staring around the room at more writers than I’ve ever seen, I agree with her. And the headlining weekend is still to come.
The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference & Bookfair is an event I’ve wanted to attend for years. So many people I admire, many through the K-State community, have made clear how special an experience the conference always is for them. But without attending a graduate school writing program, the opportunity never arose, and the national conference remained out of my reach. With 2024’s event taking place in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, my library job gave me the chance to both tout library resources and attend AWP for the first time.
Thursday, the first full conference day, got off to a memorable start as all the coffee shops within sight of downtown experienced a sudden influx of writers who needed caffeine, stat. Inside the exhibit hall, I checked in at our table, where we took it in turns over the 3-day event to let writers, professors, and others from across the country know what resources libraries can offer them. Then I made my way over to the Spartan Press table to see if I had a special delivery.
I saw it before I spoke to my editor, Jason Ryberg, in person for the first time. My first book of poetry, Dress Me Like a Prizefighter, was sitting on the table amidst all the other titles, its royal blue cover flashing up at me as clearly as the Bat-Signal upon Gotham’s cloudy skies. A few minutes later, I walked off with a box of my books, not ready to let them out of my sight.
I flipped through the entire volume reverently; ran my fingers over the dedication to my grandpa at the front; let my family know what I was finally holding in my hands as I listened to the exhibit hall crowd grow and typewriters clack away nearby. I walked down Bookfair Boulevard, smiling to myself as I looked at stacks of poetry books from every press imaginable, knowing my book was amongst them, too.
It was at the Terrain.org 25th Anniversary Reading, held in the YMCA within the former Lyric Opera building, that I began to understand just where the AWP portal had transported me. Whether they were reading about bygone pizza nights at Planet Fitness, reciting an essay memorializing a friend, now gone, or inciting joyful laughter that spread throughout the crowd, it all came back to community. These people stood in a YMCA meeting room, raised their voices over the sound of basketballs thumping against the court just outside, and read with love for the writers they’d known for years, and the writers they had yet to meet.
At the center of AWP was Jericho Brown’s 8:30 p.m. keynote. Latecomers lined the walls of the crowded room as the Pulitzer Prize-winner took the stage, following Elise Paschen’s poetry and land acknowledgement. His hour-long address tackled everything from widespread book banning practices across the United States, to a call to stand against fascism in all its forms. It was unabashedly powerful and fearlessly honest.
Brown related times he’s had to explain his profession to a seatmate on a plane: “I’d rather take a nap than explain what makes my heart beat,” he said, and you could hear the collective inhale at being so clearly seen. He spoke about how AWP is one of the few places many writers don’t have to justify or defend themselves, and on the desperate situation we’d face if we had to give up writing truth to power. “I’m a poet,” Brown said, “because I keep trying to write what’s missing.”
Friday was filled with panels on publishing, bookfair wanderings, excited conversations about public libraries, and offsite readings.
That evening, one such reading featured K-State alumni at the Jannes Library of the Kansas City Art Institute. It was my first time inside the building that sits across from the massive Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. As Elizabeth Dodd cheerfully rose and, without pre-planning it, somehow called to mind memories of students from a few years to decades-past, it was impossible not to be, once again, swept away by the tide of community. “We are met here as friends,” I thought to myself, remembering a long-past Poetry on Poyntz right after the 2016 election, when former K-State English professor Katy Karlin recited James Joyce’s “The Dead.” As the winter skies grew darker, the small room grew brighter, and I wondered at the memories we’d all created for each other in Manhattan, and in Kansas City, now, too. After my time at K-State finished, I’d often found myself missing the passionate and kind writing community I’d found there. It turns out, it’s never been far away after all. I capped my first AWP experience with an Open Mic back at Prospero’s on Saturday night. There, well after 9 p.m., I held my smooth, small book in my hands, and read from it to an audience for the first time, a flashing yellow streetlight blinking its staccato rhythm behind me above 39th Street.
“We exist side-by-side,” I recited from my poem, “love notes and dissent,” which references the time my Katy Karlin-led English class read Langston Hughes on that 2016 Election Day— “reading poetry to / November air, pledging ourselves to each / other in that fragile valor called faith.”
Through exhaustion and crowded convention halls; at readings sprinkled across Kansas City; facing book bans and the world’s grief and all the future we don’t know, AWP was a reminder of all the ways we exist, and love, and write, side-by-side. And in every hug between a professor and former student, round of applause for a brave reader, bond formed over a love of public libraries, and moment of connection between strangers, we pledged ourselves to each other.
When you spend three days witnessing and participating in that kind of community, it’s hard not to kindle faith for the future, no matter the odds.
— Catherine Strayhall (BA ’17)
K-State English 