MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
May 18-25, 2006 Edition
Graywolf Press
To Open Offices
In New York City
NEW YORK, NY/5/17/06Graywolf Press, a successful non-profit Minnesota publisher, will open a second office this spring in New York City, but has no plans to shift its focus away from literary novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and poetry.
Neither will the company move its Minnesota headquarters. Instead, Publisher Fiona McCrae will divide her time between the Minnesota and Manhattan offices. The additional office will provide Graywolf with greater access to agents and writers, and give Graywolf a greater presence in the New York heartland of publishing.
Graywolf Press was founded in 1974 in Port Townsend, Washington by Scott Walker. He occupied a small space provided by Copper Canyon Press, The company was incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in 1984, and in 1985 Walker received generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and from local philanthropic organizations, and moved the offices to Saint Paul, Minnesota.
It was in the small, cramped building at Copper Canyon that the first books were produced for the reading public. Each book was painstakingly hand-set and hand-printed on treadle-operated machines. After six months of fourteen-hour days, the first full-length poetry book, Instructions to the Double by Tess Gallagher, was given life. The small print run of fifteen hundred copies sold out in four months.
Since then, Graywolf has expanded its list to include novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, as well as poetry, and has discovered and/or promoted such writers as Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Linda Gregg, Eamon Grennan, Tony Hoagland, Jane Kenyon, William Kittredge, Carl Phillips, William Stafford, David Treuer, and Brenda Ueland. A commitment to quality, and a willingness to embrace or invent new models, has kept Graywolf at the forefront of the small press movement. Today, Graywolf is considered one of the nation’s leading nonprofit literary publishers.
