Awpwriter.org is an organization that teaches writing world wide
Title
The Association of Writers & Writing Programs
Description
The mission of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs is to foster literary talent & achievement, to advance the art of writing as essential to a good education, & to serve the makers, teachers, students, & readers of contemporary writing.
AWP was founded in 1967 to support the growing presence of writers in higher education & thereby foster new generations of writers & new audiences for literature. Some of the most important writers of this century have attended university writing programs & worked as professors of writing & literature. Richard Bausch, John Irving, Alan Gurganus, Terry McMillan, Lorrie Moore, Jane Smiley, Rosellen Brown, John Barth, Bob Shacochis, Charles Johnson, Madison Smartt Bell, & Pam Houston are just a few of the more popular writers who have studied or taught in writing programs. One generation has passed on to the next their underst&ing of the art of storytelling. At Duke, William Blackburn taught William Styron, Fred Chappell, & Reynolds Price. Price, in turn, taught Josephine Humphries & Anne Tyler. E.L. Doctrow taught Richard Ford at the University of California, Irvine. Donald Dike taught Joyce Carol Oates at Syracuse. &rew Lytle taught Harry Crews. At Stanford, Wallace Stegner taught Robert Stone, Barry Lopez, Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Raymond Carver, & many others.
Founded in 1967 by fifteen writers representing thirteen creative writing programs, The Association of Writers & Writing Programs has grown to include 22,000 individual writers, teachers, & students & 330 college & university creative writing programs in the United States, Canada, & the United Kingdom. Because AWP has been so successful, many of us take it for granted that writing workshops & readings are now a part of the study & enjoyment of literature. It's amusing to recall what oddities AWP & its original members were three decades ago. On most campuses, the best, most respected writers were those long dead & safely entombed in anthologies & libraries. Contemporary writers who taught were regarded as being too simple, too intuitive, or too peculiar in their methods to preserve the rigors of literature as a discipline.
