Starting awesome-wm when using startx?
Create a file named .xinitrc in your home directory, with this contents:
awesome
The .xinitrc file lists commands that are executed by startx in order to set up the X11 session/desktop.
You may for instance add other programs to be started (just append a & after the program invocation so that the shell does not wait for their termination before continuing).
The startx session exits when the last command from .xinitrc finishes, so be sure that the invocation of awesome is the last thing you do in that script.