Copper Canyon Press

Copper Canyon Press
Founded1972; 52 years ago (1972)
Country of originUnited States
Headquarters locationFort Worden
Port Townsend, Washington
DistributionConsortium Book Sales & Distribution
Publication typesBooks
Fiction genresPoetry
Official websitecoppercanyonpress.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.

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.

The company's logo is the Chinese character 诗 (shī), which means "poetry".

  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.