Copper Canyon Press

Last updated

Copper Canyon Press
LogoCCP.png
Founded1972;51 years ago (1972)
Country of originUnited States
Headquarters location Fort Worden
Port Townsend, Washington
Distribution Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
Publication types Books
Fiction genres Poetry
Official website coppercanyonpress.org

Copper Canyon Press [1] is an independent, non-profit small press, founded in 1972 by Sam Hamill, Tree Swenson, Bill O'Daly, and Jim Gautney, specializing exclusively in the publication of poetry. It is located in Port Townsend, Washington.

Copper Canyon Press publishes new collections of poetry by both popular and emerging [2] American poets, translations of classical and contemporary work from many of the world's cultures, [3] re-issues of out-of-print poetry classics, prose books about poetry, and anthologies.

The press achieved national attention when Copper Canyon poet W.S. Merwin won the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry [4] in the same year another Copper Canyon poet, Ted Kooser, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was appointed to a second year as United States Poet Laureate. [5] Merwin later won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry [6] and in 2010 was named United States Poet Laureate. [7] Copper Canyon has published more than 400 titles, including works by the Nobel Prize laureates Pablo Neruda, Odysseas Elytis, Octavio Paz, Vicente Aleixandre and Rabindranath Tagore; Pulitzer Prize-winners Ted Kooser, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Theodore Roethke, and W.S. Merwin; National Book Award winners Hayden Carruth, Lucille Clifton, and Ruth Stone; and some contemporary poets and translators such as Jim Harrison, C. D. Wright, Bill Porter (aka Red Pine), Norman Dubie, Eleanor Wilner, Arthur Sze, James Richardson, Tom Hennen and Lucia Perillo. In 2003 it published The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

Building #313 at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington is the home of Copper Canyon Press. Building housing Copper Canyon Press.jpg
Building #313 at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington is the home of Copper Canyon Press.

The press published What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford to great critical acclaim in 2015. In his New York Times review, [8] Dwight Garner complimented the press for performing a "vital and difficult task" and giving the reader "a chance to see him (Stanford) whole." National Public Radio called the book's release "the big event in poetry for 2015." [9]

Also in 2015, Copper Canyon Press acquired the U.S. rights to a manuscript of lost poems by the Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. Discovered by archivists from The Pablo Neruda Foundation in the summer of 2014 just after the April 2013 exhumation of Neruda's body in Chile, [10] this collection of poems has been called "a literary event of universal importance" and "the biggest find in Spanish literature in recent years". [11] The collection, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, translated by Pulitzer finalist Forrest Gander, was released in April 2016 and includes full-color, facsimile presentations of Neruda's handwritten poems. Copper Canyon was also awarded the rights to publish Neruda's first book, Crepusulario, which has also never appeared in the U.S. in English translation.

Major prizes

Related Research Articles

Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. S. Merwin</span> American poet (1927–2019)

William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hayden Carruth</span> American poet and literary critic

Hayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic and anthologist. He taught at Syracuse University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Stone</span> American poet (1915–2011)

Ruth Stone was an award-winning American poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dean Young (poet)</span> American poet (1955–2022)

Dean Young was an American contemporary poet in the lineage of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. Often cited as a second-generation New York School poet, Young also derived influence and inspiration from the work of André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the other French Surrealist poets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forrest Gander</span> Poet, essayist, novelist, critic, translator

Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Lerner</span> American writer

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

This article presents lists of historical events related to the writing of poetry during 2004. The historical context of events related to the writing of poetry in 2004 are addressed in articles such as History of Poetry Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kay Ryan</span> American poet

Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pablo Neruda</span> Chilean poet and politician (1904–1973)

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyrus Cassells</span> American poet and professor (born 1957)

Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maurice Manning (poet)</span> American poet (born 1966)

Maurice Manning is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and is a member of the poetry faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Sze</span> American poet (born 1950)

Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.

Tree Swenson is an American editor and book publisher involved with poetry, independent publishing, and American literary foundations. She was a co-founder of Copper Canyon Press.

Connie Wanek is an American poet.

Terry Ehret is an American poet. She has published several collections of poetry including Suspensions, Lost Body, and Translations from the Human Language.

David Lee is an American poet and the first poet laureate of the state of Utah. His 1999 collection News From Down to the Café was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and, in 2001, he was a finalist for the position of United States Poet Laureate. He has been acclaimed by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities as one of the twelve greatest writers to ever emerge from the state. A former farmer, he is the subject of the PBS documentary The Pig Poet. His poems have appeared widely in publications including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, and JuxtaProse Literary Magazine. He has been cited as an influence on writers such as Lance Larsen and Bonnie Jo Campbell.

A list of works by or about William Stanley Merwin. Merwin was an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose.

References

  1. Jennings, Dana (October 24, 2013). "Poetry Profiles: Copper Canyon Press" . Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  2. Jennings, Dana (October 22, 2013). "Kerry James Evans: From Combat Engineer to Poet" . Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  3. "A Small Press Brings Poetry to World : Kitsap Sun". Archived from the original on November 6, 2013. Retrieved November 6, 2013.
  4. Jenna Krajeski (April 20, 2009). "Copper Canyon's Big Time". The New Yorker.
  5. Gelder, Lawrence Van (April 9, 2005). "Arts, Briefly (Published 2005)". The New York Times. Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  6. Rich, Motoko (April 20, 2009). "Pleased by His Pulitzer, Surprised by Poetry" . Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  7. Cohen, Patricia (July 1, 2010). "W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate (Published 2010)". The New York Times. Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  8. Garner, Dwight (April 6, 2015). "Review: 'What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford' (Published 2015)". The New York Times. Retrieved December 4, 2020.
  9. "Resurrections, Do-Overs, And Second Lives: A 2015 Poetry Preview". NPR.org. January 17, 2015.
  10. Grimes, William (June 19, 2014). "Neruda Poems Found". ArtsBeat. Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  11. Flood, Alison (June 19, 2014). "Pablo Neruda poems 'of extraordinary quality' discovered". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved March 17, 2016.