Because of a botched travel connection, I was late arriving at the 2026 AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, and by the time I hit the floor in the Baltimore Convention Center in the evening, the sprawling confluence of some 10,000 writers and educators was already in a boisterous full swing. AWP has always been a contradictory experience for me; on the one hand, it is a wonderful opportunity to meet personally with so many of the writers and editors I’ve corresponded and zoomed with over time. It was especially heartening to spend time at the Solstice table in the conference bookfair getting to know our wonderful new Editor-in-Chief, Karen Sherk Chio. On the other hand, writing and editing is mostly a solitary task, wrestling with pages at a desk in a room sequestered away from human distractions. I would conservatively estimate that upwards of 80% of all writers are introverts, myself included, and my heart did a little backflip of empathy when I scanned down the long packed convention hallways, watching all of us working so earnestly hard to engage with one another, to be warm, articulate social creatures for one exhausting extended weekend. I noticed in many of my conversations, at the Solstice table and elsewhere, that people seemed more genuinely curious and compassionate than I remember at previous AWP gatherings. We wanted to understand just what each other was writing about, and why it was important to be writing these things in this moment. It struck me, that for all of the hubbub, this AWP was an intentional safe space, set against the backdrop of our deep national anxieties and eroding civic institutions and the throbbing agonies of wars around the globe. This was a place where we could draw energies from one another and find courage to write our truths.
And poetry is a particular kind of truth-telling, because poets are skilled in telling it slant, cutting right to the core of a matter by taking a lyric path that the reader of the poem would never have expected. The poems in this issue have some remarkable truths to tell, from the ekphrastic juxtapositions of Ruth Hoberman’s “On the Day We Bombed Iran” to Risë Kevalshar Collins’ astonishingly wide-ranging “for I shall consider my mistress” there are measures of challenge and comfort to be appreciated by all in these disturbing, turbulent times.
–Robbie Gamble
Robbie Gamble’s essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Pangyrus, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree and Tahoma Literary Review. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. He worked many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and now divides his time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
