Common Ground#683
Publishing-in-Transit: Copper Canyon Press
Featuring Michael Wiegers, Ryo Yamaguchi, and Cole Swensen, with Christopher Soto
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Copper Canyon Press Executive Editor Michael Wiegers and Publicist Ryo Yamaguchi join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading from Christopher Soto.
In this talk
More on Copper Canyon Press →
Michael Wiegers
Copper Canyon Press Executive Editor Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for the Press since 1993. 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. He edited the anthologies The Poet’s Child and This Art, and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he co-edited with Mónica de la Torre. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative 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.
Ryo Yamaguchi
Poet Ryo Yamaguchi is the author of The Refusal of Suitors (Noemi Press, 2015). He has worked in academic and literary publishing for presses such as Wave Books and the University of Chicago Press, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books. He is currently Publicist at Copper Canyon Press.
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Christopher Soto reading.
Christopher Soto
Poet Christopher Soto (b. 1991) is based in Los Angeles, California. His debut poetry collection, Diaries of a Terrorist, was published by Copper Canyon Press. This collection demands the abolition of policing and human caging. In 2022, he was honored with Them’s Now Award in Literature for representing the cutting edge of queer culture. He was also honored as part of Out100, which celebrates the year’s most impactful and influential LGBTQ+ people.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.