University Press Poetry Month

No press has published more books by and about Walt Whitman than the University of Iowa Press. I’ve had a close connection to the Press since 1984, when it was re-organized and upgraded by the university. That’s when Paul Zimmer was hired as director. I had become immersed in the study of Whitman by that time and was in close touch with major Whitman scholars around the nation and internationally. One of those scholars, Edwin Haviland Miller, who had edited all of Whitman’s correspondence and had written an influential study of the poet, contacted me about a book he had been working on, a kind of compendium of all the published criticism on “Song of Myself.” It struck me as an important project, and I told Zimmer about it, and he encouraged me to have Miller submit the manuscript to Iowa, which he did. The press was then in an aggressive...

The University of Nebraska Press celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2016. During those 75 years the Press has grown to be the largest university press located between Chicago and California. It publishes both books (with more than 6,000 titles still in print and an additional 150 new titles each year) and journals (with nearly 30 different journals being published each year). The press's series in poetry include the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the African Poetry Series, and Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry.

"How to Excise a Tumor" from ...

New Issues Poetry & Prose was established in 1996 by poet Herbert S. Scott. New Issues publishes four to six new poetry titles each year, as well as the winner of the AWP Award Series in the Novel. New Issues Press offices are housed in the Ernest Wilbur Building on the Oakland Campus of Western Michigan University.

“The mainstream publishing houses can’t begin to represent all of the best emerging poetry and literary fiction. Our press looks to find voices uncategorized by pressures of prestige or expectation. There is no other way except through small presses for these voices to be heard and to endure in their initial splendor.” William Olsen, Editor

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From 1975 until the 1990s, the series Illinois Short Fiction typically offered four new collections annually, each by a single author. Twice nominated by Publishers Weekly for the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing, the series was long administered at the Press by Ann Lowry, who also served as editor of the anthology Prime Number: 17 Stories from Illinois Short Fiction (1988).

The Press's commitment to poetry endured for even longer. The first of several volumes by Michael S. Harper, published in 1971,...