Each year, AWP presents the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature to an individual who has made notable donations of care, time, labor, and money to support writers and their literary accomplishments. Below is a transcript of 2025 winner Kathryn Kysar’s speech, given at the 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair.
George Garrett was a founding member and past president of AWP. He was a longtime editor of Intro, a creative writing program director, and a dedicated teacher who exalted a generation of writers. I am honored to accept this award in recognition of his great service to literature.
I believe I am the first community college professor to ever receive this honor, and in my selection, AWP is recognizing all hardworking creative writing teachers in our not-so-flashy jobs, those of us who lift up immigrants and first-generation collegegoers in open-access educational institutions, those of us who help elders achieve their writing goals in community literary centers, those of us who empower emerging writers to find their voices in prisons and high schools. This award then acknowledges the stage managers, not the stars, those of us behind the scenes who are slowly and quietly building literary communities. Our students may more often become florists and bank tellers than published novelists or literary editors, but they live their lives a bit more empowered, a bit more confident, as they spread their love of literature to family and friends, coworkers and neighbors. This is what makes our work meaningful.
My deepest thanks to my dear colleagues at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, to the Loft Literary Center and our vibrant Twin Cities literary community, to AWP’s energetic Two-Year College Caucus. My thanks to the busy alumni, teachers, writers, arts administrators, and editors who took the time to submit letters of nomination. My thanks to the George Garrett Award selection committee and to AWP’s hardworking staff and board of trustees, who, like the small man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, make this awe-inspiring conference happen every year. Most of all, my deepest thanks to my young adult children who challenge me to be a better human and to my civil rights activist parents who taught me to always, always fight for equality and stand in solidarity against injustice.
Kathryn Kysar is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited the creative nonfiction anthology Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tofte Lake Center, the Oberholtzer Foundation, and Write On, Door County. Her poems, book reviews, travel articles, and essays have been published in About Place Journal, The Fourth River, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Literary Mama, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mizna, Mollyhouse, Sequestrum, Slag Glass City, Stone Coast Review, Voice Mail Poems, and many other magazines and anthologies. She has a BA in English from Hamline University and an MFA in poetry from Wichita State University. She is the founder of the creative writing program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, and she has served on the boards of directors for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and Rain Taxi. In addition to her work at ARCC, Kysar teaches at the Loft Literary Center and performs with the Sonoglyph Collective, a poetry/improvisational jazz group. She lives in Saint Paul near the Mississippi River.
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