Copper Canyon 50th Anniversary Celebration at Elliott Bay Book Company

Poetry is vital to language and living. Based in Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press is a nationally recognized publisher dedicated to advancing the art, practice, and reading of poetry from around the world. 2023 marks a half century of its efforts in doing so—to celebrate this 50th anniversary, Copper Canyon will host a reading of poets who stand at the crossroads of poetry’s past and future. Coinciding with the AWP conference in Seattle, this reading takes advantage of a rare consortium of extraordinary poets, many of whom are convening for the first time since the pandemic, and all of whom will be presenting new or recent work.  

Deborah Landau’s newest collection of poems, Skeletons, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2023. Landau is the author of four other poetry collections: Soft Targets—winner of the Believer Book Award—The Uses of the Body, The Last Usable Hour, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and a Spanish edition of the collection, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017. Landau is a professor at New York University, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

Dana Levin’s latest collection of poems, Now Do You Know Where You Are, was published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2022, and was named a New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2022.” Levin is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Banana Palace (2016). Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Levin’s fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she lives.

Jaswinder Bolina’s newest collection of poems, English as a Second Language and Other Poems, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in fall 2023. His previous books include his debut essay collection Of Color and three other full-length poetry collections, The 44th of July (Omnidawn 2019), Phantom Camera (New Issues Press 2013, winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry), and Carrier Wave (CLP 2007, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry). His essays have been featured at the Washington Post, Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Believer, the Poetry Foundation, and others. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Miami.

Marianne Boruch’s latest poetry collection, Bestiary Dark, was published by Copper Canyon Press in fall 2022. Her ten previous collections include Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016), Cadaver, Speak (2014), The Book of Hours (2011), a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner, and The Anti-Grief (2019). She has also published a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011) and three books of essays–In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005) and in the Michigan Poets on Poetry series, Poetry’s Old Air (1995) and The Little Death of Self (2016). Her works have appeared in numerous places, including The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry, and has received Pushcart Prizes. A Guggenheim and NEA Fellow, she has had residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Yaddo, MacDowell, the American Academy in Rome, Djerassi, the Anderson Center, and two national parks, Denali and Isle Royale. A 2019 Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Canberra, Australia, and a 2012 Fulbright Professor at the University of Edinburgh, she founded Purdue University’s MFA in 1987. Having taught at Purdue for over three decades, Boruch has gone emeritus, though she continues on faculty (since 1988) in the low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson College. She and her husband, David Dunlap, live in West Lafayette, Indiana where they raised their son.

Dean Rader’s newest book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2023. His previous book, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (2017), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Rader is also the author of Works & Days, which won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Bush Memorial Prize, and won the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Often engaging in collaborative projects, Rader is the co-author of a book of collaborative sonnets entitled Suture with the poet Simone Muench, and he co-edited Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague. 

Randall Mann’s newest book, Deal: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2023. Mann is the author of five previous books of poetry: Complaint of the Garden, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, Straight Razor, Proprietary, and A Better Life. Recipient of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry and the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize awarded by Poetry magazine, Mann is also author of The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry, a book of literary criticism. Three-time finalists for the Lambda Literary Award, Mann’s poetry collections have been shortlisted for the California Book Award and Northern California Book Award, and longlisted for the Golden Poppy Awards’ Martin Cruz Diversity and Inclusion Award.

Taneum Bambrick’s latest collection of poems, Intimacies, Received, was published by Copper Canyon Press in fall 2022. Bambrick is also the author of Vantage, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book award (APR 2019). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, an  Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. Her essay, “Sturgeon,” was named a notable essay of 2019. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Nation, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, PEN, and elsewhere. She has received a fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ and Environmental Writers’ Conferences. A 2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is a Dornsife Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, and Co-Book Reviews Editor for Pleiades Magazine.

Natalie Eilbert’s newest collection of poems, Overland, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2023. Eilbert is the author of two previous poetry collections, Swan Feast (2015) and Indictus (2018), winner of the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of the prize-winning chapbooks And I Shall Again Be Virtuous (2014) and Conversations with the Stone Wife (2014). Her works engage with systemic power imbalances, social and environmental justice, and climate change, and a selection of her poems was granted the 2021 George Bogin Memorial Award. Founding editor of The Atlas Review, she is the recipient of a 2021 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives in Wisconsin where she contributes to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA TODAY as a local government and mental health reporter.

Cate Marvin’s latest collection of poems, Event Horizon, was published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2022. Her first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Her third book of poems, Oracle, published by W.W. Norton & Co., was named one of the best poetry books of 2015 by The New York Times. Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine.