Each summer, usually in June, the membership and officers of the Canadian Authors Association meet at an annual conference. Located in a different Canadian city each year and hosted by the local branch, the conferences provide CAA membership with the opportunity to meet each other, to discuss issues of interest to writers (such as copyright), and to attend professional workshops and lectures. Sometimes the conferences are organized around a specific theme (for example, the St. Catharines conference's theme "To build a book" in 1985). Occasionally conferences are co-hosted by an affiliated organization (for example, when the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia co-hosted the convention held in Halifax in 1978). The Annual General Meeting, election of the National Executive, and the National Council and Executive meetings all take place at the conference. In addition to the administration of CAA business, the conference is also the site of the annual awards banquet at which the year's award winners are presented with their prizes. Before 1976 these annual gatherings were called conventions.
Files range in content from a single photograph (Annual Convention - Vancouver and Victoria August 21-26, 1941) to an entire convention planning binder containing correspondence, minutes, pamphlets, delegate lists, etc. (Annual Conference - Hamilton June 27-29, 1992). Many of the files contain correspondence and material related to the Annual General and Executive meetings held at the conventions. Some files contain clippings, program bulletins and photographs. The series includes a spiral notebook labelled "C.A.A Convention June 22-25 1953" containing 35 pages with handwritten notes or minutes of the convention by an unidentifed author. It includes a list of names and notes on the panel discussions and/or workshops that took place during the convention. Among the subject matter are notes on: Will R. Bird discussing "Writer's Fanmail" and "How I Write a Short Story", the latter including commentary by Morley Callaghan and Jack Harris; Lionel Stevenson on "Do Modern Novelists Like People?"; Scott Young and others on "Markets"; and an address by W. Kaye Lamb. Other Canadian writers mentioned are Josephine Phelan, Marjorie Campbell, Ted Allan, Lister Sinclair, Yves Thériault and David Walker. Containers 11 to 13 contain photographs.
