written by Ainsley Atwood
On June 6 and 7, 2026, I attended the American Writers Festival for the first time. I was admittedly a little daunted at first: of the many authors who attended, I was familiar with the work of three. While I often had an idea of what to expect going into each program, I always learned something surprising, due to a panel discussion going in a different direction than anticipated or due to aspects of writers’ work that I didn’t know to expect.
I started my festival weekend at the American Writers Museum with a panel on romance, “Writing Love Stories,” featuring Penny Reid, Lucy Gilmore, and Pamala Knight. I last read a romance novel last August, so I was eager to learn more about a genre that I didn’t usually reach for. What surprised me the most was the level of research that goes into writing a romance novel. This was an aspect of fiction writing that I largely took for granted, in part because I only notice a writer’s research if they get something wrong. Both Reid and Gilmore had to delete multiple-page tangents about things they’d learned during their research that ended up having nothing to do with the plot of their novels. Unrelatedly, I also learned that old roads are the width they are to accommodate horse-drawn carriages.
Immediately after the romance panel, I was learning about baseball, a sport I know woefully little about despite rooting for three teams. The program, “Writing Baseball: The First-All Star Game,” ended up centering very little on the technicalities of baseball; instead, the interview focused on the city of Chicago, where the first All-Star game took place. Joe Kilgallon was an enthusiastic and passionate moderator; I found his interview of Randall Sullivan to be engaging in part because of his focus on the broader context of the city’s history and the history of the Great Depression.
On Sunday, the first panel I attended at the Harold Washington Library Center was “A Nation Wrestles with God,” featuring Ilan Stavans and Reza Aslan. It was interesting to hear from Stavans because he was on the panel in his capacity as an editor and publisher. Instead of talking about his own writing, he spoke about his goal of showing how the many voices featured in his anthology—A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands—were in conversation with one another. It’s very easy to think of writing as a solitary endeavor, so I appreciated seeing the work of an editor brought to the forefront alongside a contributor to the anthology. I’m very interested in the role of religion in public life, so I also found the discussion of the changing relationship to religion and spirituality very important. One fact that stuck out to me is that even though a growing number of people will mark “none” when asked their religious affiliation in surveys, those people will often talk about God in language that mirrors how organized religions conceive of God (e.g. “God is love”).
If “A Nation Wrestles with God” was one of the more educational programs, “Writing Thrillers” was probably the most fun I had over the weekend. The discussion between Mindy Mejia, Joshua Moehling, and Tracy Clark was lively and their banter kept me engaged throughout the panel. I was surprised to hear that Mejia would sometimes start writing a thriller without knowing who was behind the murders. While I found the thriller writers’ discussion of craft to be surprising, I was also interested in their candid discussion of the publishing industry’s difficulty. As Mejia put it, “if you haven’t gotten a hundred rejections, you haven’t tried.”
Throughout the Festival, I saw people who were there because they wanted to connect with something human.
After that, I stood in line to attend “Horror Writing: Books & Podcasts,” featuring Quan Barry, Jeffrey Cranor, Joseph Fink, and Scott Hawkins. I was especially excited for this panel because I had read and enjoyed works by the authors featured. Not only have I been a casual listener of the fiction podcast Welcome to Night Vale since junior high, I also loved Quan Barry’s novel We Ride Upon Sticks to the point that my copy is a bit tattered. The part of the discussion that stuck with me the most was when the members were discussing what they thought the future of horror looked like. Fink emphasized that people are sick of “glop” right now, defined as both AI-generated slop and boring, corporate franchises. Instead, Fink said, people really want to engage with something idiosyncratic and human.
I got to witness this only about ten minutes later, when I braved the Welcome to Night Vale signing line after the program. If you’ve ever listened to or read even a little bit of Welcome to Night Vale, you know that a corporation or a machine never could have made it. Its weirdness gave it a cult following that endures fifteen years after it started. Everyone I observed in line was so excited to get their books signed; the attendee I spoke with had six other Night Vale books at home. Throughout the Festival, I saw people who were there because they wanted to connect with something human, and I found it really special to hear how all of these works were made.
All in all, I was struck by how accessible the American Writers Festival was. I’m coming from an academic setting, so I’m used to attending literary events where I’ve done my homework. But at AWF, I felt able to jump in and take the opportunity to learn about a broad range of topics. In my capacity as a social media intern, I attended more snippets of programs than those I mentioned here, and I got something out of every panel. I left the Festival with a list of books to read and a better understanding of how writers write. I would recommend that anyone looking to attend the American Writers Festival in the future take the opportunity to expand their horizons beyond their normal literary tastes, and bring a tote bag to carry books.
Ainsley Atwood is a social media and marketing intern at the American Writers Museum. She hails from Chicago, but she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in English at Georgetown University. When she isn’t in a research rabbit hole or helping out at the museum, she can be found reading a good book, spending time with her friends, or enjoying a cup of chamomile tea.