McClelland & Stewart is creating a poetry board to help the imprint, which has a long history of publishing Canadian poetry, solicit and read manuscripts and publish new titles.
The board will meet several times a year and be involved in editing or recommending editors for books. The board’s first members are prominent Canadian poets Ken Babstock, Dionne Brand and Kevin Connolly.
M&S publisher Ellen Seligman told PW that she thinks having a board to curate and make recommendations for publication is an excellent way to reinvigorate and relaunch the poetry program because “we have in this case three different and accomplished minds and voices, and obviously the goal would be to have a program that has as much dynamism and variety and excellence as possible.”
Another reason to establish a board, Seligman added, is that “it is also very important for us to have people in the poetry community who know the poets, know what’s being written, know the work of emerging poets as well as the work of established poets and can help bring those poets to the program.”
Lynn Henry, publishing director for Doubleday Canada, and former publisher of House of Anansi Press, where she was actively involved with poetry, will also be a consultant to the program.
"The list will remain artistically driven and continue to be editorially supported in-house by senior editor Anita Chong," according to the announcement. The program will continue to publish two to four titles annually in the spring. The first list under direction of the board will be published in spring 2015.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to have these three incredibly strong first board members,” Seligman said. “They have standing in the literary community, editorial savvy, broad and diverse tastes and curatorial expertise, as well as a deep knowledge of and interest in the poetry community across Canada.”
Babstock’s poetry has won awards including the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Prize and the Ontario Trillium Award for Poetry.
Brand, a poet and novelist, is the author of 10 books of poetry, which have won awards including the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the Trillium Book Award. She was Toronto’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2012.
Connolly was long-time poetry editor at Coach House Books where he was known for cultivating new voices. He is an arts journalist, and his own poetry has won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
“The creation of this impressive and accomplished board heralds a new chapter in M&S’s historical poetry program, one we are committed to and see as an important part of our literary publishing,” said Kristin Cochrane, president and publisher of Random House of Canada in the announcement.
M&S has published some of Canada’s best known poets including Margaret Avison, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier and Michael Ondaatje.
