Adelphi University's Judith Baumel Elected President of the National Board of Trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) is pleased to announce the election of Judith Baumel president of the AWP Board of Trustees. Baumel, a professor of English at Adelphi University, is a former director of the Poetry Society of America and founding director of the creative writing program at Adelphi. She is the author of the poetry collections Now, The Kangaroo Girl, and the Walt Whitman Award-winning The Weight of Numbers. She has published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Hudson Review, AGNI, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Baumel has received awards from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Bronx Recognizes Its Own, and fellowships for residencies at Yaddo, Saltonstall, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and others.

“I am honored to represent the diverse literary family that is AWP because my own literary career was nurtured by the organization.” Baumel notes, “I look forward to our annual conference, where I reconnect with friends, encounter and present new creative work. And I look forward to leading AWP’s many other literary advocacy projects including our prestigious books prizes, our vibrant print and online publications, our support of teachers of creative writing at all levels and in all places.

“I’m honored to be working for AWP with such talented people—the organization’s staff, as well as my fellow trustees. This year’s conference is in Boston, where I lived in the seventies and eighties. That our two keynote speakers—Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott—were in my circle then speaks to their particular generosity and to the way the American literary community makes possible diverse artistic lives. To paraphrase my teacher and friend Robert Fitzgerald, the work of AWP is a process of ‘enlarging the change.’”

AWP hosts its Annual Conference & Bookfair in a different city of North America each year to celebrate the authors, teachers, writing programs, literary centers, and independent publishers of that region. The conference features over 400 readings, lectures, panel discussions, and forums, as well as hundreds of book signings, receptions, dances, and informal gatherings. The 2013 conference in Boston attracted more than 12,000 attendees, and featured 550 bookfair exhibitors from throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. AWP’s gathering is now the largest literary conference in North America.