Moderating a panel is hard work. You choose what you hope is a topic relevant to conference attendees, solicit panelists who can speak energetically on that topic, and write a proposal to submit. Once it’s accepted, moderators must collaborate with panelists to develop a presentation that illuminates and entertains—in the case of the annual AWP Conference & Bookfair, in just seventy-five minutes.
I reached out to three moderators for their insights into how to craft and facilitate a memorable panel.
A Title That Hooks Attendees
Writer and playwright Mark Galarrita loves coming up with titles. He moderated a 2024 AWP panel titled—with help from his panelists—“Slackers, Stoners, and Screw-Ups: APIA Writers on the Margins of the Margins.”
“You only have a short window of time to get someone’s attention,” Galarrita explains, “so you want to persuade them to stay in a few words—hook them in early, have them understand that this panel is worth their time to listen and engage with.”
Panel titles for the 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair include “Can Creative Writing Save the English Department?,” “Beyond Blind Prophets & Saintly Sufferers: Writing Disability in YA,” and “Survivors, Sluts, Sex Workers: Writing from Sexual Stigma.”
Tasked with crafting a panel title yourself? In a few pithy words, you need to give attendees a sense of what the panel is about, along with equal parts conflict and surprise to plant a question in people’s minds—they’ll get the answer by attending your panel.
Preparation Is Key
Galarrita likes to research his panelists and craft a list of questions about their work. “I’m thinking about the author’s career. What have they done as a day job? What do they continue to do?” His 2024 AWP panel focused on prose authors rebelling against stereotypes of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans. He researched each panelist’s writing to generate further questions.
“This panel was maybe the first introduction that some readers had to a person’s writing, so I wanted to introduce something exciting from one of their books, or an interesting question they raise in their work,” he explains. “Skillful moderators spin the panelist’s work, regardless of genre, in order to dig into the conversation around the question that guides the whole panel.”
Author Juanita Mantz built her 2024 AWP panel, “Navigating Stormy Waters: Telling Your Tales When They’re Hard Stories to Tell,” around people she’d interviewed on her podcast Life of JEM: Writers on Writing. “I brought on people who read their work in an entertaining manner, people who were open and vulnerable and who wouldn’t shut down on a panel,” she explains.
She loves hybrid panels, so she asked panelists to read from and talk about their work. A five-to-seven-minute reading is ideal, she says. “No one has the attention span to listen to fifteen minutes of fiction.”