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 2026 winner Maw Shein Win’s speech, given at the 2026 AWP Conference & Bookfair.
Good evening, it is an exquisite honor to be here in Baltimore to receive the AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. I’d like to thank the selection committee and hardworking staff, especially Michelle Aielli, Colleen Cable, and Micaela Tore, and to the lovely folks who kindly nominated me.
I found my first community in punk rock, poetry, and performance art in Southern California when I was nineteen years old. I played drums in a postpunk band, launched projects with artists and dancers, created zines with friends, and excelled at bad performance art. It was at this time that I learned that community meant collaboration, and collaboration meant community.
As a daughter of Burmese immigrants, there were two things I always knew from a young age: I wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to be a poet. Alas, this was not exactly what my parents had hoped for their firstborn in the US. Our family moved from Massachusetts to New York to Pennsylvania to Colorado to Nevada and finally to California. I felt ungrounded during those years, but reading and writing were centering. I was shy as a child, and started keeping a poetry journal. I didn’t show my writing to anyone until fifth grade. My teacher Mrs. Aaronson patiently read my poems on break time. On the last day of class, she wrote a rhyming poem on how I was indeed a poet. She was my first mentor. She and I were my first community built on poetry.
In my three-plus decades of teaching, in settings ranging from adult ed to literacy, composition, literature, and poetry, I strive to create a community ethos in my classroom. And I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity that teaching provides for my students and myself to learn together. I’m also thankful for the ongoing collaborative learning and support I find with my colleagues.
My work is built on the reciprocal energies of collaborative communities who advocate for each other. This effort is an outpouring of volunteer passion to organize readings, hold workshops, promote literacy, show up in public, and share work in person and online.
I’m grateful to be a part of different writing circles in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Writers Grotto, a community of working writers who connect in physical and virtual space to support each other through teaching and mentorship, and Maker, Mentor, Muse, a teaching platform which I cofounded alongside Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer. Community is essential to building a sustainable literary life and requires fostering all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, and muse. Finally, I appreciate my longtime writing groups and partners as well as lifelong collaborators, including musicians, visual artists, and other writers.
During these challenging and perilous times with funding cuts in education, the arts, social services, and with freedom of speech at stake, I believe that collaborating and supporting each other in community can help us endure and stay connected. Art is our power. Poetry is an agency for connection. Sharing our imaginations is an act of generosity.
I’ll end with a quote by poet Dana Levin: “If you’re a writer, you must write. Writing in resistance to the State is one kind of activism; writing about anything else is another. You don’t know what might spark a helping change in someone, even if that change lasts only a second—what might meet a reader’s fear or grief or rage or confusion, and witness it. Ameliorate it. It might be a poem about snow or shoes or the confessing mirror. Poetry is an endurance technology.”
Thanks so much for listening and for this incredible honor.
Maw Shein Win’s latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024), which was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry, and nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California, and the recipient of the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks, Score and Bone (Black Lawrence Press/Nomadic Press) and Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects). Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers, and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a cofounder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. Learn more at MawSheinWin.com.