The Authors Alliance team is back from Los Angeles, and we’re happy to report that our visit to UCLA and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference was a great success. We’d like to extend a warm welcome to all our new members!

An informal meet and greet event at the UCLA Library on March 31 brought together a group of faculty, staff, and others interested in issues of scholarly communication and copyright for a conversation with Mike Wolfe and UCLA librarians. To take those discussions even further, we’re planning an Authors Alliance workshop at UCLA in the near future—details to be announced soon.

From March 31 through April 2, we hosted a table at the AWP Bookfair, and were gratified by the level of interest and engagement from the writing community. Conference attendees kept us busy with questions about our resources and tools, and we were thrilled to have so many enthusiastic new members join the Authors Alliance. If you’d like to be part of our growing community of authors and creators, it’s easy to sign up online (membership is free).

In addition to staffing a robust information table, we also presented a conference panel, “On Your Terms: Managing Your Rights to Keep Your Work Available”, led by Authors Alliance executive director  Michael Wolfe and copyright attorneys Brianna Schofield, and Lila Bailey. We were glad to see the session so well attended and were pleased to answer audience questions on topics ranging from Creative Commons licenses to rights reversions to publication contract language. For those attendees interested in having a reference version of the slides, and for those who were unable to attend, you are welcome to download the presentation here. Lila, Brianna, and Michael will also be reprising their presentation at a California Lawyers for the Arts event later this April—sign up while there is still room!

Thank you, Los Angeles, for such a memorable trip. We look forward to visiting again soon!