Every year, the Associated Writing Programs hosts its annual conference for teachers and students of creative writing. The most recent iteration of AWP in March 2025 took place in Los Angeles. According to AWP, up to 10,000 people were there, but some people who attended put the number closer to 15,000.
It costs between $300 and $500 to attend AWP for three days, on top of which attendants have to pay for travel, hotels, and food. In cities like Los Angeles, that can add up quickly. Expedia shows hotel rooms near the LA convention center priced around $300 per night, and if you factor in flights, Uber rides, and restaurant meals, it’s easy to drop over a thousand dollars to attend AWP. Given the belt tightening going on in higher ed, most faculty don’t get any conference funding, meaning most people at AWP are paying out of pocket to attend. Even at schools where conference funding streams still exist, they can barely cover the cost of the conference.
Even at highly ranked universities, the average adjunct teacher of creative writing can make as little as two or three thousand dollars per class for an entire semester, but getting onto a panel at AWP can make a difference when it comes to even being considered as a hire for one of those very scarce jobs. But the vast majority of panels proposed for AWP are rejected.
Theoretically, this is a conference for students and teachers of creative writing. But for years, many of the panels have instead been about the business of writing: finding an agent, pitching magazines, working with editors. MFA programs and even undergraduate creative writing programs should be covering these topics with students. But many of them don’t, leaving students to navigate the nuts and bolts of a writing career on their own.
And the cost of tuition at many MFA programs also means people are going deeply into debt to fund their MFAs, and during the MFA they’re usually pressured to attend AWP, once again out of pocket. More debt, often being sold as a pathway to teaching and publishing industry jobs that simply don’t exist any more.
Creative writing, or at least academic creative writing, is becoming a hobby for the rich.
This isn’t new: before universities essentially became the patrons of many writers, writers had actual patrons, often wealthy individuals who loved culture but lacked talent. Then universities experienced a boom in creative writing programs, followed by the inevitable bust.
But the question of who can afford to take 2-3 years to earn a degree that is not likely to lead to paying work remains an issue for those of us paying attention to the increasing obsession with credentialism in creative writing. There used to be creative writing MFAs; now there are creative writing PhDs, a degree that did not even exist, at least according to some cursory research, until the 1980s. Which not so coincidentally was during the beginning of the MFA boom. If universities saw MFA programs as money-making enterprises, creative writing PhDs just made them even more money and created more fences for writers to scale.
Again, though, who gets to even put a foot on the ladder? At my first AWP in Atlanta in 2007, the way I quickly determined that many people there had money was by looking at their clothes. I like thinking about personal style, and know enough about labels to recognize people wearing brand new items from expensive, trendy shops like Anthropologie or Free People.
The look at the time was bohemian, and poets and novelists swirled around the Marriott or whatever chain hotel we were in wearing tiered maxi dresses and statement necklaces and boots – outfits that I quickly added up to costing hundreds of dollars. A woman in the bathroom was going from writer to writer asking for an iPhone charger, which nobody had because the iPhone was first released that year.
The next year, AWP was in New York, and at that point I had a book to promote. My rinky-dink small press publisher didn’t want to pay for a table in the book fair, so another author and I paid for it ourselves and quickly discovered we were in the most remote corner of the book fair, so far from Big Five presses like Simon and Shuster it took twenty minutes to walk from our Siberian exile to the Starbucks counter at the bookfair’s entry. We lost money, of course. By the third day I was handing out free copies of my book because shipping them back was going to cost me even more money that I didn’t have. I did dress better at that conference, though, aware that it meant maybe people would take me more seriously.
After the flight home my feet were so swollen from walking around at AWP that I couldn’t get them back into the black leather boots I couldn’t afford but bought anyway because everyone else had such nice shoes, and I went home late at night on the train in my socks.
A man without an MFA. James Baldwin, from the Bettman Archive.
Decades into being a working writer and academic, I’m aware that many writers do in fact have some kind of income stream that’s out of reach to those of us from low income backgrounds: family money, a spouse who’s a lawyer, doctor or CEO, investments. If you’ve ever been poor, you will always feel impostor syndrome in academia to some degree. When I tell other academics my mother was a teacher, they usually assume she was a professor, since many academics come from academic families. She was, in fact, an elementary school teacher in a district that regularly pink slipped her due to budget issues.
But before I went to AWP, I assumed that plenty of other writers had grown up poor. My literary idol, James Baldwin, started working to help support his impoverished family when he was still a child and dropped out of school at 17 to work. When he was writing his first novel he wasn’t in Iowa City sitting around a seminar table. He laid railroad tracks and worked in a meat packing plant. He learned to write by reading, by spending time with writers who mentored him, and by picking up freelance writing jobs.
Is that kind of career trajectory even possible today? It’s rare to meet working class people at AWP or in MFA programs because the price of everything is so high, and landing the kinds of internships that in turn lead to publishing and job opportunities preposterously requires that people work for free. Creative writing, or at least the academic, institutional version of it, is just as much of an oligarchy as our government is these days.
So what do you do if you are poor and you want to be a writer? The one time I taught in an MFA program I was appalled to hear one of my students say she’d be graduating 60 thousand dollars in debt. This is obscene. We should resist it as much as possible.
Books are free at the library. Start there. If you need classes, community colleges are full of writers who are also pretty good teachers much of the time. Social media is a hellscape but there are also writer’s groups that meet for free on Meetup and elsewhere. Or you can start one of your own. Hell, you can start your own literary magazine too, for nothing – free website builder + a little bit of time is all that’s required.
The credentials of MFAs and writing conferences are just keys that open doors, but if you really want to write, you can kick down a few doors too. And these days, we should really all be doing more of that. Because there’s nothing more that establishments hate more than people who have found ways to get in without paying.