Founded | 1993 |
---|---|
Founder | Jane Brox, Helen Fremont, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Martha Rhodes |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | New York City |
Distribution | University of Chicago Press |
Publication types | Books |
Fiction genres | poetry and short fiction |
Official website | fourwaybooks |
Four Way Books is an American nonprofit literary press located in New York City, which publishes poetry and short fiction by emerging and established writers. It features the work of the winners of national poetry competitions, as well as collections accepted through general submission, panel selection, and solicitation by the editors. [1] The press is run by director and founding editor Martha Rhodes, [2] who is the author of five poetry collections. [3] [ circular reference ] Four Way Books titles are distributed by University of Chicago Press. [4] The press has received grants from New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, [5] and The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses through their re-grant program. [6]
Representative authors published by Four Way Books include Catherine Bowman, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Kevin Prufer, Forrest Hamer, Yona Harvey, Monica Youn, Alex Dimitrov, Jeffrey Harrison, Sarah Gorham, D. Nurkse, Gregory Pardlo, C. Dale Young, Noelle Kocot, Joel Brouwer, Michael Dumanis, Cynthia Cruz, Pablo Medina, John Gallaher, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Maya Pindyck, Cynthia Huntington, Jason Schneiderman, Monica Ferrell, Sarah Manguso, and Eugenia Leigh.
Authors have been recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, [7] the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, [8] the Rome Prize, [9] The Edward Lewis Wallant Award, [10] Guggenheim Fellowships, NEA fellowships, and many other honors; and Tommye Blount's Fantasia for the Man in Blue was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award [11] Four Way Books authors have been interviewed on the PBS NewsHour, [12] regional [13] [14] and national radio, [15] [16] and print media, [17] [18] including The New York Times. [19]
Four Way Books titles have been reviewed in The New Yorker, [20] Publishers Weekly, [21] Library Journal, [22] Kirkus Reviews, [23] Booklist, [24] and many other publications. The press has been profiled in The New York Times Arts Beat, [25] and in Poets & Writers . [26] In a twenty-fifth anniversary feature of the press, the Los Angeles Review of Books praised Four Way Books for "publishing some of the most interesting, aesthetically diverse collections of poetry and fiction in the country." [27]
The press sponsors the annual Levis Prize in Poetry for a full-length poetry collection; and through their Four Way Books + Friends Program, has sponsored since 1993, joint readings by its authors with those of other presses, and authors yet to be published. [28] [29] The press also sponsors "Pay a Book Forward, which offers free books to college students who attend readings," and "the electronic journal Four Way Review, which publishes poetry and fiction from emerging and established authors." [30]
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.
Ruth Stone was an American poet.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
Cynthia Huntington is an American poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire.
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.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
C. Dale Young is an American poet and writer, physician, editor and educator of Asian and Latino descent.
Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, novelist, academic, editor, and essayist. He is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Casualty Reports, Because What Else Could I Do, Night Unto Night, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.
Word Riot was an American online magazine that published poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, reviews, and interviews.
Alice James Books is an American non-profit poetry press located in New Gloucester, Maine.
Sarabande Books is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1994. It is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with an office in New York City. Sarabande publishes contemporary poetry and nonfiction. Sarabande is a literary press whose books have earned reviews in the New York Times.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is an American independent, non-profit literary publishing company located in Rochester, New York, founded in 1976 by the late poet, editor and translator, A. Poulin, Jr., and publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Major Jackson is an American poet and professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022, The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. His prose is published in A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson. He is host of the podcast The Slowdown.
Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”
Glass Mountain is an undergraduate literary magazine at the University of Houston that was established in 2006. The title is an allusion to a short story with the same title by Donald Barthelme. The magazine publishes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, literary essays, and art written by undergraduates. Each issue also includes interviews with notable literary figures, including Mat Johnson, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, Tony Hoagland, and others. The publication is listed in the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and launched its first national issue in 2011. In 2013, the journal was awarded the Director's Prize for content by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Digest is a 2014 poetry collection by Gregory Pardlo published by Four Way Books. Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a nominee for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 46th NAACP Image Award. Pardlo started work on the collection in 2004 "as an effort to mesh academic with creative writing."