Philip Hoy founded The Waywiser Press in 2001, and it quickly earned praise as one of the UK’s best publishers of poetry (Christopher Ricks, New Statesman). Tom Sleigh called it a press [to] admire for its integrity, intelligence, and heart. Starting in 2005, Hoy partnered with senior American editor Joseph Harrison (1957-2024) to develop the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, which Richard Kenney hailed as the poetry world’s new plum. Since then, The Waywiser Press has run nineteen successful Hecht Prize contests resulting in the publication of exciting new voices, as well as continuing to publish books by established writers. The press has grown with the support of a robust cohort of associate editors, authors, and friends.

At the end of 2025, Philip Hoy will retire as Editor-in-Chief of The Waywiser Press. Associate Editors Katherine Hollander, Dora Malech, Eric McHenry, and V. Penelope Pelizzon, who have volunteered with The Waywiser Press for many years, are in the process of establishing a nonprofit successor organization, Waywiser Books, in the United States. As a 501(c)(3) organization, Waywiser Books will be on secure footing to carry the legacy of The Waywiser Press onward to a new generation of poets and readers. Waywiser Books will continue to run the Hecht Prize, publish new collections of poetry and other work, and support the extraordinary catalog developed by The Waywiser Press over the past 22 years. A new prize in honor of Philip Hoy and the late Joseph Harrison, the Hoy-Harrison Prize, is being established to celebrate their tradition of collaborative literary excellence and editorial leadership.

We hope you will join us in looking forward to an exciting new chapter for Waywiser.

July 1st, 2024

On March 28th 2024, we learned that our US distributor, SPD (Small Press Distribution, of Berkeley, CA), is being legally dissolved, and ceasing to trade with immediate effect. This leaves Waywiser and some 500 other small presses temporarily without representation in the USA.

Our books are safely and securely warehoused with PSSC (Publishers Storage and Shipping LLC) in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and we are working to appoint a new US distributor just as soon as possible.

In the meantime, please note that all of our books can still be purchased through this website, and that distribution by our UK distributors, Inpress Ltd, is wholly unaffected.

More news will be posted here in due course.

The Waywiser Team

Following a short illness, our esteemed and beloved colleague and friend Joe Harrison passed away on 13February 2024. The news has left his family, everyone who knew or worked with him, and many of those who simply admired his work shocked and deeply saddened.

Joe was one of the finest poets of his generation, the author of four marvelously accomplished  collections (Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015), and Sometimes I Dream That I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020). Just how good he was is attested to by the long line of people who wrote in praise of his work, among them John Ashbery, Harold Bloom, Rachel Hadas, Anthony Hecht, Edward Hirsch, John Hollander, Eric Ormsby, Mary Jo Salter, Alan Shapiro, Anne Stevenson, Rosanna Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Stephen Yenser.

Joe joined Waywiser’s editorial board a year after the press’s founding in 2003, and quickly went from being an Associate Editor to being its Senior American Editor. In due course,  he also took on the demanding role of Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize co-ordinator. His judgment, imagination, passion, tact, and chutzpah helped make the Hecht Prize the greatly valued thing it is, and played a vital role in ensuring Waywiser’s success more generally.

More than a year before he fell ill, Waywiser had drawn up plans to publish Joe’s Collected Poems, and to do so in the fall of 2025. However, after we learned of his terminal diagnosis, in the fall of 2024, we instantly rescheduled, and printed copies were available in time for Joe to see his life’s work brought together between the covers of one remarkable book.

Joseph Harrison’s Collected Poems will be published on 18 April 2024.

Waywiser’s editorial board lament the loss of their irreplaceable colleague and friend, and extend their deepest condolences to his grieving family.

It is with great sadness that we learned yesterday, November 6th 2023, of the death of David Ferry, whose On This Side of the River: Selected Poems we published in 2012. It will be some consolation to Mr Ferry’s many admirers to know that a new book of his is about to be published. Titled Some Things I Said, the book will be launched in Boston, MA on December 13th. Full details of this event are given below:

You are welcome to join the book launch of “Some Things I Said” by David Ferry. Dan Chiasson is giving the introduction. Alan Shapiro is reading the title poem. George Kalogeris is providing an afterword.

December 13th, 6pm
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,
113 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA

Full details can be found on the event’s official poster, here

Our sincere condolences go to Mr Ferry’s family.

The Waywiser Press is pleased to announce that Clive Watkins, one our founding editors and author of Jigsaw (2003) and Already the Flames (2014), has won third prize in the 2021 – 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition for The Occasions: Seventeen Poems translated from Eugenio Montale’s Italian text Le Occasioni. The large field spanned thirty-six languages from across the globe. The competition is sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association and the British Centre for Literary Translation and is hosted by the University of Leeds. This is particularly gratifying given Waywiser’s recent publication of Late Montale, George Bradley’s translated selection of poems from the last decades of Montale’s life.

To read the official announcement, please click on the following link: 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition Results. You will need to scroll down the page to reach the results.

It was with great sadness that we learned of Anthony Thwaite’s death, age 90, on April 22, 2021. Mr Thwaite, a distinguished poet, editor and critic, judged the tenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for us in 2015, and flew to Washington D.C. to present the prize to its winner, Jaimee Hills, and to read alongside her in the city’s Folger Shakespeare Library — a memorable and well-attended occasion. Our condolences go to his wife Anne and their four daughters.

To read a full obituary, please click on this link: Eric Homberger’s obituary of Anthony Thwaite, The Guardian, 23.4.21

Katherine Hollander, whose My German Dictionary won the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, which was published by Waywiser in the autumn of 2019, has been commissioned by Bloomsbury/Methuen to edit and write a new introduction and notes for a student edition of one of Bertolt Brecht’s best-known plays, Mother Courage and Her Children.

Chris Andrews, whose Lime Green Chair was awarded the seventh annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and published by Waywiser in 2012 has been declared winner of the the Mick Imlah Poetry Prize for his poem, “This is the Crow with the Broken Caw”. As well as seeing his poem published in in the TLS (December 20, 2019), Chris receives a purse of £3,000. The TLS‘s deputy editor, Alan Jenkins, speaking as one of the contest’s three judges, writes that “This is …” struck us with its play between the mechanical and the natural, between the empire of development (and its ruins), and the ecosphere it is encroaching on; the sense the poem conveys “of human and non-human lives going on at the same time but at different speeds, instigating little eruptions in the narrative”, as [his fellow judge] Karen [Solie] said. All of us took pleasure in the details of this Australian (sub?)urban pastoral, and in its solid construction and vivid phrasing.” Our congratulations go to Chris, of whom his fellow countryman Chris Wallace-Crabbe has rightly said, Alert and sparkling, my fellow poet … has an eye for every small thing in our modern cities: and the words for it.

The December 1st deadline for the fifteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize has now passed, and the judging process is underway. The contest’s results will be posted on the press’s website – at The Waywiser Press – in March 2020.

This portal will re-open for submissions to the next Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in August 2020.