Copper Canyon Press 50th Anniversary Celebration

Three of the most important poets writing today come together to celebrate Copper Canyon Press, an institution that has had an outsized role in sustaining the artform for more than half a century. Marking Copper Canyon Press’s 50th anniversary as an independent publisher dedicated to poetry, this reading by Pulitzer Prize winners and Poets Laureate testifies to poetry’s remarkable adaptability. Jorie Graham will read lyric documents recording an Earth in environmental peril. Jericho Brown will deliver innovative poetic forms that express the pain—and beauty—of Black and queer life. And Paisley Rekdal will present hybrid text-and-media works that reexamine the history of the West through the stories of the laborers who built it.

National Book Award winner and longtime Santa Fe resident Arthur Sze will open the event with a discussion of the history of Lannan Foundation and Copper Canyon Press and their importance to American literature. Copper Canyon Executive Editor Michael Wiegers will then introduce the readers, joining all the participants afterward in a closing conversation about poetry’s continued importance as we face the future.

“A Jorie Graham poem is a deep burrow into a position from which one can gather nothing but the sense of being terribly alive.”—New York Magazine

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry. She has been widely translated and she is the recipient of multiple honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, the International Nonino Prize, and most notably the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems. About her New York Magazine recently wrote: She is currently Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard University. Her most recent collection, To 2040, was published by Copper Canyon Press this spring.

“By some literary magic―no, it’s precision, and Brown manages to bestow upon even the most public of subjects the most intimate and personal stakes.”—NPR

Jericho Brown is the author of three collections of poems, most recently The Tradition, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of several fellowships from institutions such as the Guggenheim and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. NPR has noted of Brown: Brown is currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing.

“Rekdal is a poet of observation and history, one who carefully weighs the consequences of time. She revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries. . . . These are some of the best lyric poems being written today.”—Los Angeles Times

Paisley Rekdal is the author of three works of nonfiction, including The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam, and several collections of poetry, most recently a poetry and multimedia work called West: A Translation, published this spring by Copper Canyon Press. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. She is Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center, and she has served as Utah’s state Poet Laureate.

“Sze is simultaneously the microscope and telescope of the poetry world. And more. To truly attend to these poems is to begin to feel like you have been opened to a kaleidoscopic experience of the cosmos, a multisensual one whose kinetic foci gather moments across time and space, word and world.”—Terrain

Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including Sight Lines, which won the National Book Award, Compass Rose, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A Chancellor Emeritus at the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe. His latest work, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, will be published by Copper Canyon in 2024.

“Copper Canyon Press may be a little nonprofit publisher far from New York, but over the last 50 years, its editors in Port Townsend, Washington, have shaped and elevated American poetry.”—Washington Post

Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief. He has edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. Most recently, he edited two anthologies of Copper Canyon Press poetry, both published this year: A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry and Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years of Copper Canyon Press. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative magazine and regularly speaks about the art of publishing at universities and colleges around the world. He is currently at work on a book about the poet W.S. Merwin.