Creativity is always in bloom at Wesleyan University Press. A trusted source of books of poetry and books on music, dance, and art, the press, based in Middletown, Conn., has published more than 1,500 titles since 1957, nearly 1,000 of which are still in print, and has distributed over 3.5 million works across the globe. Small but mighty is how Suzanna Tamminen, director and editor-in-chief, describes the publisher, which is known for releasing original works that speak to a diverse community of readers, for championing experimental writers such as John Cage, and for its dance scholarship on groundbreaking artists like Eiko Otake, Liz Lerman, and Cecilia Vicuña.
Among the press’s many strengths is its poetry list, which features luminaries such as James Tate, Joy Harjo, and Brenda Hillman and has garnered national and international accolades, including numerous Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and National Book Critics Circle awards. The press also publishes a music/culture series and a dance series that cover history, ethnography, theory, and everything in between on musicians and dancers across the world. Recent successes include Evie Shockley’s Suddenly We, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, and Noel Lobley’s Sound Fragments: From Field Recording to African Electronic Stories, winner of the IASPM Book Prize and the Bruno Nettl Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Nurturing professional bonds with writers is a priority for the press, which has maintained decades-long relationships with some of the most influential poets writing today. Among them is Rae Armantrout, with whom it has published 14 books, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Versed and 2024’s Go Figure, which collects crystalline poems on “the meaning and irony of human existence.” It also prides itself on bringing writers into the mainstream, for example, Jack Spicer, a poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. The press is home to Spicer’s collected works, from series editor Peter Gizzi, including Spicer’s collected poetry, plays, lectures, and a forthcoming volume of collected letters.
The publisher’s new and notable 2024 titles include the poetry collection Soon and Wholly by Idra Novey, author of the acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need, which tackles “the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth,” and Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons by Ben Barson, “a new understanding of the birth of jazz through a fine-grained social history of early African American musicians.” Looking ahead to 2025, there’s So Much Secret Labor: James Wright and Translation edited by Jeffrey Katz, Saundra Rose Maley, and Anne Wright, which explores how poet James Wright’s passion for translation fueled his development, and Ars Poeticas by Juliana Spahr, which offers “meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right-wing populism.”
