| Parent company | Wesleyan University |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1957 |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Middletown, Connecticut |
| Key people | Suzanna Tamminen |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | wesleyan |
Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist. [1] [2]
Founded (in its present form) in 1957, the press publishes books of poetry and books on music, dance and performance, American Studies, and film. [2] [3] [4] [5] In 1965, Wesleyan sold its American Education Publications, a division of the press that published My Weekly Reader, but the university retained the scholarly division. [6] All editing occurs at the editorial office building of the press on the Wesleyan campus. Publishing (printing) now occurs through a consortium of New England college academic presses.
The press is notable among prestigious American academic presses for its poetry series, which publishes both established poets and new ones. [7] [8] The press has released more than 250 titles in its poetry series and has garnered, in that series alone, awards including five Pulitzer Prizes, a Bollingen Prize, three National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and an American Book Award. [2] [3] [7] [9] [10] [11] According to The New York Times, university presses with bigger endowments, with financial backing from the state, or with large graduate programs do not enjoy the same status in the field of poetry that the Wesleyan University Press enjoys, nor have they won a comparable array of prizes in poetry. [12] The press also has garnered Pulitzer Prizes, American Book Awards, and other awards in its other series. [11]
Norman O. Brown and John Cage were two of the prominent early authors whose work was published by the press. [6] The press's poetry series was nurtured in its infancy by noted poet Richard Wilbur, then an English professor at the university. [7] [8] [13] In the mid-1950s, William Manchester, who would become a long time writer-in-residence and professor at the university, served as an editor at the press. [14] Donald Hall, a future Poet Laureate of the United States, served as a member of the editorial board for poetry at the press from 1958 to 1964. [15] In the 1960s, T.S. Eliot served both as a roving editor for the poetry series and special editorial consultant of the press. In the former capacity, Eliot's responsibilities included finding rising English and European poets for the press. [6] [16]
Wesleyan is the smallest college or university in the nation to have its own press, [17] and the Wesleyan University Press has the second-oldest poetry series in the nation. [2] Approximately 25 books are published each year. [17]
Authors and poets published by the press include John Luther Adams, Rae Armantrout (including her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Versed ), Samuel R. Delany, James Dickey (18th U.S. Poet Laureate), Brenda Hillman, Paul Horgan (including two Pulitzer Prize-winning books), David Ignatow, Yusef Komunyakaa (including his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Neon Vernacular), Justine Larbalestier, Heather McHugh, Juliet McMains, Farah Mendlesohn, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Louis Simpson (including his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection At The End Of The Open Road), Richard Slotkin, James Tate (including his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection James Tate: Selected Poems), Jean Valentine, Gerald Vizenor, Charles Wright, James Wright (including his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Collected Poems). Recently, Wesleyan published a new edition of poetry from Jack Spicer, which went on to win a 2009 American Book Award, contributing to the resurgence of a poet who died in public obscurity (of acute alcoholism) in 1965. [18]
Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
Gerald Daniel Stern was an American poet, essayist, and educator. The author of twenty collections of poetry and four books of essays, he taught literature and creative writing at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Raritan Valley Community College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. From 2009 until his death, he was a distinguished poet-in-residence and faculty member of Drew University's graduate program for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in poetry.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
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.
Versed is a book of poetry written by Rae Armantrout and published by Wesleyan University Press in 2009. It won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry after being named a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout is only the third poet to win two out of these three awards in one year.
Charles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States.
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Louis Aston Marantz Simpson was an American poet born in Jamaica. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At the End of the Open Road.
James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
William Morris Meredith Jr. was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980, and the recipient of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Joan Murray is an American poet, writer, playwright and editor. She is best known for her narrative poems, particularly her book-length novel-in-verse, Queen of the Mist; her collection Looking for the Parade which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition, and her New and Selected Poems volume, Swimming for the Ark, which was chosen as the inaugural volume in White Pine Press's Distinguished Poets Series.
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.
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.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Spencer Reece is a poet and presbyter who lives in Madrid, Spain. He graduated from Wesleyan University (1985). Reece received his M.A. from the University of York (UK), his M.T.S. from the Harvard Divinity School, and a M.Div. from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale Divinity School. At Wesleyan, Spencer took a class in writing verse with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, whom he describes as "an early encourager," along with James Merrill, the Stonington poet with whom Spencer corresponded.
Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, academic, editor, and essayist. His most recent books are How He Loved Them ,Churches, In A Beautiful Country and National Anthem.
Jean Valentine was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
Heather McHugh is an American poet notable for the independent ranges of her aesthetic as a poet, and for her working devotion to teaching and translating literature.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Sounding the Body: Improvisation, Representation and Subjectivity is one in a series of books on musical improvisation as a cultural practice to be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2012 as part of the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research project.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
