While many of the panels at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Conference and Bookfair, which took place in Baltimore from March 4–7, addressed the impacts of generative AI on literature, those discussions only emphasized the ways in which writing is an entirely human expression. Meanwhile, the crowded book fair and snaking lines for featured programming, such as the keynote address by filmmaker and author John Waters, evidenced a great deal of hunger for literature and human connection.
According to AWP, this year’s event drew 10,500 attendees and featured 650 exhibiting organizations, 366 on-site events, and 180 off-site literary gatherings across Baltimore.
While visiting the bookfair, held at the Baltimore Convention Center, poet Jimin Seo observed that despite the larger crowds at this year’s conference, the event felt more “focused” than last year’s iteration in Los Angeles. (The 2025 event drew 10,000 attendees.) Many publishers concurred, noting they were far more likely this year to be greeted by fans of their books and journals than by naïve aspiring writers asking how to submit their work.
Edoardo Andreoni, an editor at Europa tabling for the publisher, said he was grateful for the support from readers. Crowds mobbed the book fair once it opened at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday morning—a change of pace from previous years, reported Caelan Ernest Nardone, a publicist at Graywolf. Sales were brisk, especially by Friday. Madeleine Nephew, a publicist at Transit Books, said sales picked up considerably at her table by the second day, reporting $1,300 in book sales over the first half of Friday alone.
With remote work a reality for many organizations, the conference was a chance for colleagues to see each other. At a bar across the street from the Baltimore Convention Center, the editors of Literary Hub, who are spread across the Eastern Seaboard, explained that they made the trip because it was a chance to spend time with their contributors and publishing partners, as well as one other.
Indeed, Baltimore proved a great setting for socializing and literary culture, with readings and receptions at community spaces such as Red Emma’s Bookstore and Café and a dye-making coop called Blue Light Junction, where the organization Critical Minded hosted a party to showcase the work of cultural critics from underrepresented backgrounds.
Waters kicked off his entertaining and often ribald keynote address by welcoming the crowd to his native Baltimore, and then opined on book bans, declaring that libraries should be able to “give a kid any book they want,” to much applause. He also described his development as a reader and writer, noting that as a boy in Catholic school he was “saved” by Grove Press titles from authors such as Jean Genet. Finally, he addressed the struggle it takes for a writer to break through, claiming that a person becomes a writer when they win over a third reader: someone who’s not their mother or “the person they’re fucking.”
Over the course of the four-day event, in the walkways and lounges of the cavernous convention center, attendees eagerly made introductions with each other and shared details about their upcoming publications. There was a palpable hunger not just for networking, but for the craft-oriented and pedagogical programming on offer. Attendees traded stories about being turned away from multiple popular events that were filled to capacity. Among the most well attended were events on AI, including panels that addressed the technology as a tool for book editors and considered it through the lens of speculative fiction.
During a panel titled “AI and the Editor: Redefining Writer-Editor Collaboration,” moderator Christina Frey emphasized that generative AI systems “don’t generate meaning or truth,” and said they should not be used for writing. Meanwhile, freelance nonfiction book editor Linda Ruggeri, who compared learning AI to learning DOS as a kid, said she uses it for the “practical” aspects of her work, such as making sure a manuscript’s table of contents is comprehensive. Tanesha Curtis, an author and editor, said the work of an editor is to advocate for the reader, and that human editors cannot be replaced by AI because the technology does not have an ear for clarity or nuance. After acknowledging AI users’ ethical concerns, from the fact that the systems were “trained on stolen books” to the tech’s carbon footprint, author Katherine Pickett cautioned against using it for writing, although she raised eyebrows after recommending that writers try using AI to get acquainted with the style of a new genre they’d like to explore, for instance by asking it to rewrite a piece of women’s fiction in the style of a romantic suspense novel.
Other programming addressed the role of speculative writers in envisioning a future with A.I., and the effect that using generative A.I. has on creative work. On a panel titled “Speculating the Machine,” science fiction author Sequoia Nagamatsu argued that fiction should portray the ways in which AI technologies are “inherently harmful in their current form,” owing to their carbon footprint among many other drawbacks, rather than reflect the mythology of companies such as Anthropic that the tech is purely beneficial. (Nagamatsu quipped that on a more realistic version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the android Commander Data would have been “effusing methane.”) Meanwhile, novelist Erika Swyler said that good speculative fiction remains focused on the human elements of a story, and that fiction about AI ought to focus on how AI is reflective of humanity and what we lose if we think of ourselves as machines.
Finally, during “Art Under Threat? The Use of AI in Creative Writing,” presented in partnership with PEN America, journalist Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, explained that she doesn’t use AI, worrying that “the language will affect my writing and thinking.” Before Vauhini Vara published her tech-infused debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, she reported on AI for the Wall Street Journal out of a desire to interrogate the promises made by tech companies such as those cited in the previous event by Nagamatsu. Vara also emphasized that she has never “collaborated” with ChatGPT; when AI-generated text appears in her essay collection Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (a PW Best Book of 2025), she explained, it’s meant to highlight the contrast between human expression and the chatbot’s simulacrum.
By Saturday afternoon, after three nights of parties and two full days at the conference, writers and publishers were energized and exhausted in equal measure. Some were losing their voices. Bookfair sales remained brisk. The New Directions table was almost out of books, having been flooded with enthusiastic fans of their list, including titles by recent Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai. Feminist press LittlePuss sold most of its stock, more than 200 units; founding publisher Casey Plett grinned with a stack of empty boxes on the floor behind her.
Ultimately, educators, publishers and writers were restored with a sense of why they do what they do. John Reed, director of the New School’s Creative Writing MFA Program, which held a booth at the bookfair, pointed out that last year, some of the programming reflected anxieties for the type of small presses that participate in the conference, such as the problem of distribution in the wake of SPD’s closure, but that this year, discussions of art were largely free from concerns of commerce. People simply wanted to talk about writing.
