About The Waywiser Press

"Since the accountancy department at Oxford University Press closed down its rival, the poetry department, there has been a gap in British poetry publishing. Almost invisibly, Philip Hoy's Waywiser Press has begun to fill the gap, publishing a small group of poets in handsome little volumes at wonderfully low prices ..." – Jim McCue, The Times   "Be grateful that small presses like Waywiser still exist." – Thomas Jones, London Review of Books

Background The Waywiser Press is a small independent company, with its main office in the UK, and a subsidiary in the USA. It was founded in late 2001, and started publishing in 2002. Waywiser is a literary press, first and foremost, with a special interest in modern poetry and fiction. From time to time, however, we also issue books belonging to other literary genres – e.g. memoir, criticism, history. We are keen to promote the work of new as well as established authors, and would like to rescue still others from undeserved neglect.

Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief Philip Hoy Philip Hoy was born in London in 1952, and educated at the Universities of York and Leeds. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy, a subject he has taught for many years, both in the UK and overseas. As well as founding and managing The Waywiser Press, he co-founded and manages Between The Lines, now an imprint of Waywiser, which is devoted to publishing book-length interviews with contemporary poets. His most recent publications are W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between The Lines, London, 1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between The Lines, London, 1999, 2001), and Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between The Lines, London, 2001). An interview with Hoy concerning Between The Lines was published in the Dark Horse: "The Interviewer Interviewed: N.S Thompson talks to Philip Hoy, editor of Between The Lines", The Dark Horse, 15, Summer 2003: 40-46. This interview can be read on-line at: http://www.waywiser-press.com/imprints/darkhorse.html A more recent interview, concerning Waywiser and its editorial policy, was published in issue 5 of Michael Glover's on-line magazine, the Bow-Wow Shop, and can be read by going to http://www.bowwowshop.org.uk/page19.htm Senior American Editor Joseph Harrison Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else’s Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he received a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Baltimore.   Associate Editors Clive Watkins Clive Watkins was born in Sheffield in 1945. His poems have appeared widely in magazines, including Agenda, Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, The Rialto, the Dark Horse, the Hudson Review, the Alabama Literary Review and the Malahat Review. He has read at venues in the UK – amongst others, at Grasmere (for the Wordsworth Trust) and at Oxford University – and in the USA and Greece. He has written essays for various journals, on subjects as diverse as Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, Edward Thomas, E J Scovell and Michael Longley. He is a tutor for The Poetry School, London. His collection, Jigsaw, was published by Waywiser in 2003.   Greg Williamson Greg Williamson was born in 1964 and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He was educated at Vanderbilt, Wisconsin-Madison and Johns Hopkins Universities, and is the author of three collections of poetry, The Silent Partner (Story Line Press, 1995), Errors in the Script (Sewanee Writers' Series/The Overlook Press, 2001), and, most recently, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck (Waywiser, 2008). Williamson's poetry has earned him the Nathan Haskell Dole Prize, the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, a John Atherton Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Duluth, Georgia.

A note for the curious "Waywiser" Way"wis`er. Now Hist. 1651. [Formed after German. wegweiser (= Dutch wegwijzer, Swedish vägvisare, Danish vejviser), f. weg way n.1 + weiser, agent-n. f. weisen show.] The English sense is not found in the other Teutonic languages. In German the word has, besides its primary sense of "one who or something which shows the way", several other meanings, the most common being "guide-post", which is also current in Dutch, Danish and Swedish.] 1. An instrument for measuring and indicating a distance travelled by road. Of various forms, usually operated either by the step of the pedestrian or by the revolution of the wheels of the vehicle. [Adapted from the OED] A waywiser, as illustrated on the copyright page of John Ogilby's Britannia, Volume the First: Or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales: Description of the Principal Roads Thereof (M.DC.LXXV)