The Gist of the Most Recent AWP Commotion
Publisher's Weekly sums up the ruckus surrounding accusations leveled at AWP this week, after a piece at Huffington Post by Kate Gale--Managing Editor of Red Hen Press and one of 18 members of the subcommittee involved in planning events around the 2016 conference in Los Angeles--fueled a social media fire, and was subsequently taken down by the author (replaced with this apology: "AWP Is Us"). PW obtained screenshots of the original. Jacket Copy also has the story: "It looks like AWP has a diversity problem." More:
Gale's piece ... followed a petition launched last week that claims the organization "is not meeting the needs of writers with disabilities." Gale's piece listed a number of minority and marginalized groups and appeared to make light of their complaints.
Gale's piece included this anecdote: "This summer I was at a dinner and someone leaned across to me and confided, 'AWP hates Native Americans.' 'Really now?' I said. 'I'm going to be in Washington this summer and I'd love to discuss this with them.' I took out a pen and paper. 'Who hates Indians at the office there? Is it Fenza?' I pictured [AWP Executive Director] David Fenza saddling up a horse, Stetson in place, going out to shoot Indians." She attempted to express her affinity for minority groups by explaining that she herself is "50% Jewish" and "30% gay."
PW connects the problem to AWP itself:
Poet Laura Mullen, who is director of the creative writing program at Louisiana State University, felt Gale's article is symptomatic of a larger issue at AWP. She claimed that AWP executive director David Fenza tried to intimidate her after she’d tweeted AWP using her personal Twitter account, asking for information about the race and gender breakdown of panels that were accepted and rejected for the 2016 conference.
Mullen told PW she received an “astonishing, condescending, bullying” email from Fenza--which was also sent to both her department chair and associate chair at LSU--stating that she was casting “aspersions” on AWP.
“I was shocked,” Mullen said. She subsequently blogged about the correspondence, and a petition has been launched, demanding that AWP “change its practices to improve diversity, accessibility, and transparency.”
Mullen isn't the only AWP attendee to lash out at the group, either. Memoirist and poet Stephen Kuusisto wrote about the difficulty of attending AWP conferences as a blind person with a guide dog. He wrote: "After a decade of attending their conferences, I’ve found the cumulative experience so demoralizing I’ve decided both to speak out about the matter and to skip the affair.”
Fenza told PW that AWP was not aware of Gale’s column before it was posted, and that it “did not and does not endorse it.”