Ten thousand writers will descend on Baltimore this week for the country’s largest literary festival, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference & Bookfair.

The AWP conference runs from Wednesday through Saturday at the Baltimore Convention Center, but there will also be dozens of free and open-to-the-public readings, dance parties and performances, including a circus-themed burlesque and drag show and a trans and “hon-binary” reading.

Baltimore Beat and Baltimore magazine have compiled guides, and BmoreArt has background on local planning and a lovely map created by young people.

Baltimore’s complex history, moody weather and idiosyncratic residents have been inspiring writers for hundreds of years.

Here are a few of the most interesting authors who live or have lived here. This is far from an exhaustive list — I didn’t even get into Edgar Allan Poe or H.L. Mencken — but hopefully a springboard for literary exploration.

Lucille Clifton

“and I am consumed with love for all of it / the everydayness of bravery of hate of fear of tragedy,“ wrote Lucille Clifton, longtime poet laureate of Maryland and National Book Award winner, who died in Baltimore in 2010. The Clifton House, her former home, will be open to visitors this week.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you’ve read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ books, including “The Beautiful Struggle” and “Between the World and Me,” you know the National Book Award winner grew up in West Baltimore. His father, W. Paul Coates, is also a literary legend. In 1978, the elder Coates founded Black Classic Press, which is “devoted to publishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent.”

Adrienne Rich

In Baltimore, “Where did you go to school?” refers to your high school. For the late feminist poet and scholar Adrienne Rich, the answer was Roland Park Country School, a fact that made the headline of Baltimore Fishbowl’s 2012 obituary of Rich. (The New York Times called her a poet of “an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity” in its obit.)

Anne Tyler

The odds are basically zero that you will run into Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler in Baltimore; the octogenarian author is famously reclusive. But you can visit the winsome neighborhoods where her books are set. Roland Park, Charles Village and Hamilton feel quintessentially Tylerian.

Gertrude Stein

There are so many fascinating details to learn about Gertrude Stein’s time in Baltimore. She attended Hopkins’ medical school for women, where she smoked cigars and befriended sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, whose art collection fills the BMA. Stein lived at 215 E. Biddle St., where she fell into a neighborhood love triangle. (For more turn-of-the-century Baltimore lesbian drama, check out historian and AWP participant Ben Egerman’s zine The Friday Nights.)

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

If you’re familiar with the story of novelists F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, you know their time in Baltimore was dramatic and terribly unhappy.

The couple and their daughter, Scottie, lived in a suburban Towson mansion, La Paix, while Zelda received mental health care at nearby Sheppard Pratt hospital. After Zelda accidentally set fire to La Paix, passersby helped rush the couple’s books out of the house.

Scott, thinking he had failed as a novelist and descending deeper into alcoholism, later lived at 1307 Park Ave. in Bolton Hill and the Cambridge Arms Apartments near the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus with Scottie while Zelda was hospitalized at a series of institutions.

John Waters

One of the wonderful things about Baltimore is that it is very easy to run into the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters, the AWP conference’s keynote speaker. Atomic Books in Hampden is a favorite Waters hangout as well as his mailing address. I’ve also run into Waters multiple times at Melanie’s at Griffith’s Tavern in Hampden, and The Club Car and Club Charles in Station North.

Bonus: Best places to write a poem

The gardens surrounding Mount Vernon Place, the sculpture garden of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Mama Koko’s cafe and bar and Fadensønnen beer garden, the latter two in Old Goucher.