February 1, 2012 —It is with profound sadness that we announce that brilliant poet and visual artist Dorothea Tanning, author of A Table of Content and Coming to That, passed away in her sleep last night. She was 101 years old.

"All of us at Graywolf Press note with sadness the death of Dorothea Tanning," said senior editor Jeffrey Shotts. "We are honored to have published her two poetry books, the first of which was published when she was 94 and the second of which was published just last fall when she turned 101. As she herself remarked, with her usual wry self-awareness, she was 'the oldest emerging poet.' The fact that she could have such an illustrious career as a visual artist and, so late in that career, then turn to poetry with such forceful craft and signature imagination is a triumph of her unparalleled vision and indomitable spirit. Working with her over two books has been one of the greatest delights of my career as an editor. Knowing her these last ten years will remain one of the signposts of my life. She is missed."


ARTIST, ONCE

That was in a room for rent.
It had a window and a bed,

it was enough for dreaming,
for stunning facts like being

at last, and undeniably
in NYC, enough to hold

enfolded as in pregnancy,
those not-yet-painted works

to be. They, hanging fire,
slow to come—to come

out—being deep inside her,
oozing metamorphosis

in her warm dark, took
their time and promised.

Fast forward. Trapped in now,
she's not all that sure.

Compared to what entwined
her mind before the test,

before the raw achievement
pat, secure—oh, such bounty

to be lived, yet untasted,
undefined—all the rest . . .

"Artist, Once" from Coming to That. Copyright © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning.

Photo © Sylvia Plachy, 2010.

Due to reduced office hours over the holiday season, orders placed after December 23, 2011, will not be filled until January 3, 2012. Thank you for your patience.

Happy holidays from all of us at Graywolf Press!

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October 12, 2011—Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker has been selected as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. The winner will be announced at the 62^nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 16. Each winner receives $10,000 plus a bronze statue; each Finalist receives a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award. Actor, writer, and musician John Lithgow will host this year’s ceremony and dinner.

Other finalists in the nonfiction category include Mary Gabriel (Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution), Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern), Manning Marable (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention), and Lauren Redniss (Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout). This year’s judges were Yunte Huang, Jille Lepore, Barbara Savage, and Alice Kaplan, who was the panel chair.
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October 6, 2011-- Graywolf Press is thrilled to announce that after many years of being considered a frontrunner, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2001, Graywolf published The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, chosen and translated by Robert Bly, to critical acclaim. The news was announced this morning in Stockholm.

The New York Times called the poems of Tomas Tranströmer “points of entry ‘upward into/the depths’ of an imagination, a spirit that is regeneratively inventive, capacious, unillusioned, undaunted, admirable.” Robert Bly, a longtime friend as well as one of Tranströmer’s first translators, carefully chose the very best of Tranströmer’s poems to make The Half-Finished Heaven a indispensible and necessary collection. In his introduction to the book, Bly wrote that “Tomas Tranströmer has a strange genius for the image; images rise seemingly without effort on his part. . . . His poems are a sort of railway station where trains that have come enormous distances stand briefly in the same building. One train may have some Russian snow on the undercarriage, and another may have Mediterranean flowers fresh in the compartments, and Ruhr soot on the roofs.”

Tomas Tranströmer was born and educated in Stockholm. He has written thirteen books of poems and is the recipient of such honors as the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. His poetry has been translated into over sixty languages.

Robert Bly is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor of over fifty books, for which he has received many prizes. His most recent poetry collections include Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages, The Urge to Travel Long Distances, and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, and The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge, which he translated with Robert Hedin. Bly lives in Minneapolis.

February 2011--At its 2011 Annual Conference and Bookfair, the Assoication of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) honored House of Widows author Askold Melnyczuk as this year’s recipient of the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. The conference was held in Washington, DC, February 2-4, 2011. 9,400 people attended, making it one of North America's largest literary gatherings.

An association of 500 creative writing programs in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, AWP is a nonprofit arts and educational organization. It was founded in 1967 to represent the growing ranks of poets and writers in academe.

A much beloved teacher of writing and literature, Melnyczuk currently teaches in the Department of English at UMass Boston and in the Writing Seminars of Bennington College. He is the founding editor of Agni Magazine, which he established in 1972, and his is the founding publisher of Arrowsmith Press, which he established in 2005. He is the author of three novels and a novella, The House of Widows (2008), The Ambassador of the Dead (2001), What Is Told (1994), and Blind Angel (2004). He has also served as the translator or editor for many other works. He has served as chair of PEN New England’s Freedom to Write Committee. He has taught in prisons, and he helped to establish writing project for “at-risk” youth.

In conferring the award, AWP Executive Director David Fenza said, “He has taught many, he has published many, and he has made our literary circles more thoughtful, more fruitful, and more generous. It’s the default position of writers and artists today to be rebels and iconoclasts—to disparage, dissent, disregard, dismantle, and disrespect; and these tactics have their utility. But William Butler Yeats said, ‘Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.’ Within the strife of our literary politics (and our national politics), we need leaders who seek affinities. We need those who aspire to that spirit of bridging and building. We need to those who lead with whom and what they love. Askold Melnyczuk is one of those leaders.”

The award is named after a founding member of AWP, George Garrett, who made exceptional contributions to his fellow writers as a teacher, mentor, editor, friend, board member, and good spirit. George Garrett served for many years as the editor of Intro, an annual anthology of work by emerging writers; he served on the AWP Board of Directors; he taught creative writing and literature for more than forty years; and he published more than thirty books. As a writer, teacher, mentor, editor, and inspiration, George Garrett helped many young writers who are now major contributors to contemporary letters. The award includes a $2,000 honorarium from AWP in addition to travel, accommodations, and registration for attending the AWP Annual Conference and Bookfair.

February 2011—Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson has been named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The winners of the NBCC Awards will be announced on March 11 during a ceremony at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium.

Katie Dublinski, Associate Publisher at Graywolf Press was delighted with the news. “It’s such a thrill to have Vanishing Point recognized by the National Book Critics Circle,” she said. “Like all of Ander Monson’s work, both in print and online, Vanishing Point pushes boundaries and reenvisions the possibilities of memoir and essay.”

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir is a provocative and witty series of meditations in which Monson faces down the idea of the memoir, grappling with the lure of self-interest and self-presentation. “In the New York Times Book Review, David Shields wrote that Monson “turns the banality of nonfiction inside out and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area to investigate claims of fact and truth, an extremely rich theater for exploring the most serious ontological questions.”

Ander Monson’s inquiry transcends the physical limitations of the book through the use of typographical “daggers,” which correspond to additional content on his website, Other Electricities. This type of inventiveness and formal play led to praise such as Bookslut’s pronouncement that Monson is “one of the most original voices in America. Monson challenges the reader, literally and formally, to find themselves within an object that is fixed and unchanging—to, ultimately, decide what is important and what can be set aside for the time being, all in the service of better defining I.”

The National Book Critics Circle is a not-for-profit organization of book editors and critics with some 600 members nationwide. The organization was founded in 1974 to encourage and raise the quality of book criticism in all media and to create a way for critics to communicate with one another about their professional concerns (www.bookcritics.org).

March 22, 2011 – Graywolf Press is delighted to announce that poets Tom Sleigh and Matthea Harvey will receive literature awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The awards, which will honor nineteen writers, will be presented in New York in May at the Academy's annual Ceremonial.

Tom Sleigh (Army Cats, forthcoming this May) is the recipient of the inaugural John Updike award of $20,000, established by Mrs. John Updike in memory of her husband. The award is to be given biennially to a writer in mid-career who has demonstrated consistent excellence. Matthea Harvey (Modern Life), is the recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award, a $10,000 prize to a young writer of fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry.

The literature prizes, totaling $185,000, honor both established and emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The Academy’s 250 members nominate candidates, and a rotating committee of writers selects winners. This year’s committee members were Paula Fox, Philip Levine, Romulus Linney, Alison Lurie, and Joy Williams.

For a complete list of the 2011 literature award winners, and to learn more about the American Academy of Arts and Letters, please visit www.artsandletters.org.

John Haines, author of the memoir The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, passed away on March 2 at the age of 86. Our thoughts are with his family.

August 12, 2010—Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that The Report by Jessica Francis Kane has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2010 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The annual prize carries with it a $10,000 cash award, and this year, for the first time, each finalist will receive a $1,000 award. The Report, a moving account based on a nearly forgotten event of World War II, is a timely and provocative commentary on the way all tragedies are remembered and endured.

The Report was joined on the shortlist by six other debut novels: The Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross, The Quickening by Michelle Hoover, and This is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry. The winner will be announced on December 6, 2010 by last year’s First Novel Prize winner, John Pipkin, at the Center for Fiction’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner at the Raquet & Tennis Club in New York City.

The First Novel Prize, launched in 2006 as the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, was created as part of the Center’s mission to promote the art of fiction in the United States and help further the careers of promising new writers. Beginning this year, the Center’s First Novel Prize has been renamed the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, thanks to the very generous support of writer Nancy Dunnan, a member of the board of The Center for Fiction, in honor of her late father, Ray Flaherty, an Iowa writer.

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Graywolf author Rochelle Sutin passed away on December 19, after a long and remarkable life. Our thoughts are with her family.

Listen to a story that Minnesota Public Radio re-ran in her memory. Read articles from the American Jewish World and the Star Tribune (Minneapolis).

October 2010--Graywolf Press and the National Poetry Series are pleased to announce that Eléna Rivera has been awarded the 2010 Robert Fagles Translation Prize.  Ms. Rivera’s project, The Rest of the Voyage, is a translation of the French poet Bernard Noёl, and will be published in November 2011 by Graywolf Press.  Acclaimed poet and translator Susan Stewart served as judge for this year’s award, responding with this comment: “Eléna Rivera’s translation of Bernard Noёl’s Le Reste du voyage/The Rest of the Voyage is at once original and remarkably faithful. . . . The succession of poems has a fluency that becomes as mesmerizing as any mode of transport, for Rivera is remarkably adept at varying the lines, landing with emphasis or muting the effect as she follows the speed and light of Noёl’s themes.”  

Eléna Rivera is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation, a Fundacíon Valparaíso 2009 residency in Mojácar, Spain, and was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secret of Breath was published by Burning Deck Press 2009. Other translations also can be found in the Chicago Review, Tuesday: An Art Project,Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and Tarpaulin Sky. She is a poet and the author of Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), and most recently Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL e-ed itions, 2010). She lives in New York City. Read more...

September 2010--Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that Tiphanie Yanique, author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony, has been named winner of a prestigious Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. The Rona Jaffe Foundation will honor its annual Writers' Awards winners at a private ceremony on September 23rd in New York City. Six emerging women writers, including Yanique, have been singled out for excellence by the Foundation and will receive awards of $25,000 each.

The other 2010 winners are Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Rachel Aviv, Sara Elizabeth Johnson, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, and Laura Newbern. The program – the only national literary awards program of its kind devoted exclusively to women – was created by celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe to identify and support women writers of unusual talent and promise in the early stages of their writing careers. Ms. Jaffe passed away in 2005.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards are given to writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Since the program began in 1995, the Foundation has awarded more than $1 million to emergent women writers. Past recipients of the Writers’ Awards, such as Eula Biss, Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, Kathleen Graber, Aryn Kyle, ZZ Packer, Julia Slavin, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Julia Whitty have since received wider critical recognition. In addition, several Rona Jaffe winners have had recent literary debuts: Elif Batuman, Carin Clevidence, Robin Ekiss, Rivka Galchen, Holly Goddard Jones, Lori Ostlund, and Melissa Range.
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October 5, 2010--Graywolf Press is thrilled to announce that Tiphanie Yanique, author of the story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony, has been named to the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 list, a prestigious honor that recognizes five young fiction writers chosen by National Book Award Winners and Finalists. A reading and party for the honorees will be held at powerHouse Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn at the start of National Book Awards Week on Monday, November 15. Musician and author Roseanne Cash will host the event and music journalist Rob Sheffield will be the guest DJ.

Leslie Shipman, Director of Programs at the National Book Foundation, comments, "In the five years of 5 Under 35, we've been thrilled to see many of our honorees go on to receive great acclaim. We're delighted that 5 Under 35 provides us with an opportunity to recognize these young writers early in their careers, with the help of past National Book Award Winners and Finalists."

The four fiction writers rounding out the 5 Under 35 list are Sarah Braunstein (The Sweet Relief of Missing Children), Grace Krilanovich (The Orange Eats Creeps), Téa Obreht (The Tiger's Wife), and Paul Yoon (Once the Shore). Yanique was selected by Jayne Anne Phillips, a Fiction finalist in 2009.

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April 14, 2010--Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that National Book Award finalist Salvatore Scibona, author The End, has been named a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow. Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today that in its eighty-sixth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of some 3,000 applicants.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise. One of the hallmarks of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is the diversity of its Fellows.

The full list of 2010 Fellows may be viewed at http://www.gf.org.

March 30, 2010—The Grey Album: Music, Lying, & the Blackness of Being by Kevin Young has been chosen as the newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Young will receive a $12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essays in Spring 2012.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and is given to an outstanding manuscript by an emerging author who has published no more than two previous books of nonfiction. Last year’s winner, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, was recently awarded the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award.

Robert Polito, esteemed author and Director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York, served as the outside judge for the contest. “This is a narrative of surprises—a book of secrets, too, though many of those secrets, as we discover, are cunningly hidden in plain sight (or in plain speech),” said Polito. “The Grey Album investigates, even as it also performs, an American covert history—the stories behind any official or familiar story—as well as some emblematic escapes from and into American history. Veering across many vernaculars, from literature into music, theory into autobiography, Kevin Young writes cultural criticism of the most audacious, skillful, and ultimately touching sort.”

Kevin Young, who was a National Book Award finalist for his poetry collection Jelly Roll, was thrilled to win the Prize. “Words can’t describe how elated I was upon hearing that I had won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for The Grey Album, the mash-up of music, literature, and lying I have been working on for more years than I care to admit. I’m all the more excited to appear on such a distinguished list, and hope to do the prize—and my subject—justice.” Read more...

March 12, 2010--Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss has been selected as the winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The winners were announced last night during a ceremony at the New School's Tishman Auditorium.

Jeffrey Shotts, senior editor at Graywolf Press, was thrilled with the news. "The NBCC Awards are one of the majors," he said. "It's gratifying to have an award come out of such a large and distinguished body of critics and writers and serious people about the art and craft of literature. We couldn't be prouder of Eula Biss."

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays was named a best book of the year by Time Out Chicago and a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Students. Biss's spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. National Public Radio called the collection "forceful, beautiful essays," and the Chicago Tribune said "Biss is telling us the story of our country--one we never saw coming." The book won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
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February 4, 2010—Graywolf Press is delighted to announce that D. A. Powell has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his latest collection, Chronic. The prestigious award, founded in 1992, is given annually by Claremont Graduate University to honor work by a midcareer poet. The awards will be presented on Thursday, April 22, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

The panel of final judges for the 2010 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards were Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, Paul Muldoon, Carl Phillips, and Charles Harper Webb.

Graywolf Press senior editor Jeffrey Shotts was thrilled with the news. “D. A. Powell is one of the major poets of our time, and it’s wonderful to have the Kingsley Tufts Award recognize that,” he said. “Considering that Powell was selected by such a diverse committee of esteemed poets, that makes it all the sweeter. And, of course, six figures doesn’t hurt either.”

Graywolf poet Matthea Harvey won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award last year for her collection Modern Life.
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January 25, 2010--On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its book awards for the publishing year 2009 at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York. Graywolf Press is thrilled to inform you that they received three nominations: Chronic by D. A. Powell in the poetry category, and Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry by Stephen Burt and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, both in the criticism category.

The NBCC consists of some 600 book reviewers and was founded in 1974. The awards will be given out on Thursday, March 11, at the New School in New York. For a complete list of finalists in all six categories, please visit the NBCC website.

Last year Graywolf had two finalists in the poetry category, Modern Life by Matthea Harvey and Elegy by Mary Jo Bang, which went on to win the award.

nEW yORK, ny (September 3, 2009) — Graywolf Press and Cave Canem Foundation, Inc., North America’s premier “home for black poetry,” are pleased to announce that Gary Jackson has received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for his manuscript, Missing you, Metropolis, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. Graywolf Press will publish the collection in fall 2010. Additionally, Mr. Jackson will receive $1,000 and a feature reading.

Yusef Komunyakaa writes, “Gary Jackson's Missing you, Metropolis embodies and underscores a voice uniquely shaped and tuned for the 21st century. Playful, jaunty and highly serious…the collection is gauged by a sophisticated heart. Pathos breathes within and slightly underneath the visual comedy, and this quality is the true genius of Missing you, Metropolis.”

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After many wonderful years in the great city of St. Paul, Graywolf Press is moving to the warehouse district of Minneapolis. Effective September 8, 2009, we can be reached at the following address:

Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, MN 55401

Due to the move, we are not accepting manuscript submissions during the month of September. Please read our submission guidelines for more information.