AG Educational Events
Thursday, March 5, 2026
12:10 pm-1:25 pm Eastern
Room 310, Level 300, Baltimore Convention Center, 1 W Pratt St, Baltimore, Maryland
This event is sponsored by the Authors Guild.
Among practitioners and teachers of writing, a resistance to AI is taking all kinds of creative forms: organizing among colleagues to change language in publishing and teaching contracts; crafting legal strategies to counter those of AI companies; refusing requests to incorporate AI into writing and teaching practice; and much more. This panel, drawing on the tradition of workers’ inquiry, is meant for those interested in hearing from colleagues deeply involved in crafting these strategies.
This is an in-person event at the 2026 AWP Conference and Bookfair. This event will not be livestreamed or recorded.
Dr. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies–such as AI and machine learning–and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. With Emily M. Bender, she also runs the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype for a live audience online on Twitch and her podcast. She has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Socius, Sociological Science, Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS.
Dr. Hanna has been a VCCA Fellow and serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. She is also recipient of the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Forward Award, has been included on FastCompany’s Queer 50 (2021, 2024) List and Business Insider’s AI Power List, and has been featured in the Cal Academy of Sciences New Science exhibit, which highlights queer and trans scientists of color.
Umair Kazi is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Authors Guild. He studied law at the University of Iowa, and creative writing at Columbia University.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”Her essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Vauhini Vara, moderator, is the author of Searches, named a best book of the year by Esquire and a Belletrist Book Club pick; Publisher’s Weekly called it a “remarkable meditation.” Her previous books are This is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and won the High Plains Book Award, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also a journalist and a 2025 Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence, currently working as a contributing writer for Businessweek.
