News

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2008   Details about the fourth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, as well as guidelines and application forms, are now available. Please click on the logo below.

Joseph Harrison featured on Verse Daily Joseph Harrison's poem "Virtual Death", taken from his Waywiser collection, Identity Theft, was featured on Verse Daily in August 2008. http://www.versedaily.org/2008/aboutjosephharrisonit.shtml

Erica Dawson's Big-Eyed Afraid chosen as Best Debut Volume for 2007   It gives us great pleasure to announce that Erica's Dawsons' Anthony Hecht Prize-winning volume, Big-Eyed Afraid, has been chosen as Best Debut Volume for 2007 by the prestigious on-line magazine, Contemporary Poetry Review. http://www.cprw.com/

New publications   We are pleased to announce publication of two new poetry collections, Joseph Harrison's Identity Theft and Greg Williamson's A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck. These books, together with a compendium of earlier interviews from Between The Lines, Seven American Poets in Conversation: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur, received their US launch at "A Fine Excess: A Three-Day Celebration of Poetry", held at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA between April 2nd and 4th 2008. For further information about these books, click on the links below: Joseph Harrison, Identity Theft Greg Williamson, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck Seven American Poets in Conversation

Waywiser in the news   The August issue of the online magazine Urbanite has a feature on poetry in Baltimore which mentions three Waywiser poets — Joseph Harrison, Greg Williamson, and the winner of the third Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Rose Kelleher. To read this article, please click on the link below: http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/sub.cfm?issueID=63&sectionID=4&articleID=1019 The summer 2007 issue of Poetry News (newsletter of the UK's Poetry Society) contains a profile of Waywiser in the shape of an interview with its managing editor, Philip Hoy.

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2007   The winner of the third annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize is Rose Kelleher's Bundle o'Tinder. For further details about the winner and the finalists and semi-finalists, and an opportunity to read poems from all of the manuscripts which made it as far as the semi-finals, please click on the logo below.

Eric McHenry's Potscrubber Lullabies wins the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2007   It gives us great pleasure to announce that Eric McHenry's first collection of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies, which Waywiser published in the summer of 2006, has won the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2007. The judges in 2007 were Robert Wrigley, Alice Quinn, Allison Joseph, Robert Pinsky and Charles Webb. For further information, please follow the link below: http://www.cgu.edu/pages/4546.asp?ItemID=951 McHenry will receive his award and give a reading (alongside Rodney Jones, who won the associated Kingsley Tufts Award) on April 24th at the Zipper Concert Hall, The Colburn School of Music, 200 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The event will get under way at 6pm. For further details, please follow the link below: http://www.cgu.edu/tufts/tuftsawards.html

Morri Creech's Field Knowledge nominated for major literary award   We are delighted to announce that Morri Creech's Field Knowledge, winner of the very first Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, has been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry. More details about the LA Times Book Prize, together with a complete list of its previous winners — which includes Anthony Hecht, Richard Howard, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, Alan Shapiro, Robert Pinsky, Philip Levine, Derek Walcott and James Merrill — can be found on the LA Times's website, at: http://www.latimes.com/extras/bookprizes/ The judges this year are Eloise Klein Healy, Adam Kirsch and David St John..

Ian Parks and Eric McHenry featured in The Independent on Sunday   Poems from two of Waywiser's summer 2006 collections have been featured as The Sunday Poem in recent issues of The Independent on Sunday. Parks's "The Anarchists" appeared on August 13th 2006 and McHenry's "Nursery Rhyme" appeared on September 17th 2006.

Jeffrey Harrison featured on Poetry Daily The title poem of Jeffrey Harrison's Waywiser collection, The Names of Things: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Poetry Daily as its poem of the day for August 18th 2006. http://poems.com/namephar.htm

Eric McHenry featured on Slate Slate magazine has chosen "The Incumbent", from Eric McHenry's Waywiser collection, Potscrubber Lullabies, as its poem of the week [posted June 20th 2006]. If you would like to read the poem, and/or hear the author reading it, click on the link below: http://www.slate.com/id/2142346

Richard Wilbur wins the 2006 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Waywiser would like to congratulate Richard Wilbur (whose Collected Poems 1943-2004 we published in 2005, and whose Mayflies we published in 2004), who has just been declared winner of the 2006 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986, this is one of the most prestigious awards given to poets in America, and at $100,000 it is also one of the nation's most remunerative. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, made the announcement on April 18th. The prize was presented at an evening ceremony at the Arts Club in Chicago on May 25th. Mr Wiman said: "If you had to put all your money on one living poet whose work will be read in a hundred years, Richard Wilbur would be a good bet. He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop ... " And John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, declared: "No contemporary poet has brought so much lived experience into such formally perfect poems as Richard Wilbur. Entering a Wilbur poem is a deeply civil and civilizing experience, from which we emerge better human beings. The Poetry Foundation is pleased to represent Ruth Lilly, once again, in giving this major award to a poet as extraordinary as Wilbur." If you would like to read the US Newswire service's account of this announcement, click on the link below Richard Wilbur, winner of the 2006 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Waywiser in the news The September/October 2005 issue of the prestigious American journal, Poets & Writers Magazine, carries a lengthy article about Waywiser written by the Florida-based poet Steve Kronen (whose latest collection, Splendor, is was published by BOA Editions in April 2006). The article, entitled "Waywiser Press: The Small British Press That Publishes Big American Poets", is one of three devoted to independent presses, and offers as good an account of Waywiser's origins, purpose and strategies as is currently available. To read this article online at Poets & Writers Magazine's website, please click on the link below: "Waywiser Press: The Small British Press That Publishes Big American Poets"