I didn't quite manage to figure out how to get Seraph Press books to the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, but thanks to the good grace and proactiveness of Roger Hickin of Cold Hub Press, Seraph Press books have made it to the AWP Conference twice now. The most recent conference was earlier this month, and Roger has kindly written a piece explaining what AWP is and what he was up to there.
At the AWP Bookfair, Boston, 7–9 March 2013
I’d just come from 35˚C in Nicaragua. In Boston the temperature was scarcely above 0˚C and there was a snowstorm on the way.
I was in Boston for the AWP Conference. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, i.e., all the university creative writing programmes in the USA. And each year, in a different US city (this year Boston), they have a big conference, more of a convention perhaps, with now upwards of 11,000 aspiring writers, practising writers, writing teachers and administrators, all eager to progress their careers. Lectures, seminars, discussions, readings, book launches. “Nothing else has quite the packed, desperate frenzy of AWP,” writes my friend Jim Kates, poet, translator, co-director of Zephyr Press, an AWP veteran.
I’d just come from 35˚C in Nicaragua. In Boston the temperature was scarcely above 0˚C and there was a snowstorm on the way.
I was in Boston for the AWP Conference. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, i.e., all the university creative writing programmes in the USA. And each year, in a different US city (this year Boston), they have a big conference, more of a convention perhaps, with now upwards of 11,000 aspiring writers, practising writers, writing teachers and administrators, all eager to progress their careers. Lectures, seminars, discussions, readings, book launches. “Nothing else has quite the packed, desperate frenzy of AWP,” writes my friend Jim Kates, poet, translator, co-director of Zephyr Press, an AWP veteran.
The AWP Bookfair, with the Cold Hub Press and Seraph Press table in foreground
There’s a bookfair too, for three days, from 8.30 am to 6.00 pm, with all the associated university presses displaying their magazines and peddling the first books of their ambitious star graduates. And among this orgy of programmatic creativity (“This is, after all,” says my friend, “a conference not of writers, but of writing programs”), like Daniels in the lions’ den, are some independent small presses and literary magazines. These are mostly US-based, but this year Versal was there from Amsterdam and for the second time, Seraph Press and Cold Hub Press from New Zealand.
The aspiring writers, mostly unacquainted with world literature, or indeed with anything much other than their tutors’ work and their own dreams of publication, drift by the tables with a casual glance at covers, but there are enough genuine readers, writers, editors, translators to make the thing worthwhile.
The aspiring writers, mostly unacquainted with world literature, or indeed with anything much other than their tutors’ work and their own dreams of publication, drift by the tables with a casual glance at covers, but there are enough genuine readers, writers, editors, translators to make the thing worthwhile.
Cold Hub Press and Seraph Press books (plus a couple of recent issues of JAAM)
Books are examined, admired, discussed, swapped, bought; cards are exchanged, invitations issued to submit work to magazines. On the Seraph/Cold Hub table Vivienne Plumb’s The Cheese and Onion Sandwich (Seraph Press) sold out (it’s a little guidebook to the quirks of Middle Earth after all); John Gallas’s Fucking Poets (a three-volume Cold Hub Press chapbook) was, unsurprisingly, the most scrutinised title on the table and almost sold out.
Outside, in a foot of snow, brownstone Boston was doing its best to look like an impressionist painting. But by the time we emerged from the cavernous Hynes Convention Centre for the last time the snow was beginning to turn to slush.
Roger Hickin
Outside, in a foot of snow, brownstone Boston was doing its best to look like an impressionist painting. But by the time we emerged from the cavernous Hynes Convention Centre for the last time the snow was beginning to turn to slush.
Roger Hickin
