Wake Forest University Press

Welcome

"Wake Forest University Press ... is really the best press in the Western hemisphere for Irish literature."
DANA GIOIA, past Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

"Through Wake Forest University Press, Ireland comes to America."
HELEN VENDLER, Harvard University

Established in 1976, Wake Forest University Press is a non-profit literary publisher located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on the campus of Wake Forest University. Although small among university presses, we are the major publisher of Irish poetry in North America.

We publish approximately four to six titles per year, all from native Irish poets.

We welcome you to our website, and invite you to stay awhile and browse. You can order from us directly from the categories on the left.

If you have any questions, please contact us via e-mail or phone.

Events

UPCOMING:
Poets Harry Clifton, Paula Meehan,
and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
will be in the U.S. for readings in Autumn 2009.

News and Reviews

NEW RELEASES :
Ciaran Carson: Collected Poems
Paula Meehan: Painting Rain
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Selected Poems

NEWS: Harry Clifton and Conor O'Callaghan both have three poems in the March 2009 issue of Poetry. To read them...

TO HEAR Sinead Morrissey and Chris Agee read from The New North at the national launch at the Library of Congress last fall.

Director Jeff Holdridge has just published The Poetry of Paul Muldoon with the Liffey Press. For more info...

REVIEWS:
For All We Know by Ciaran Carson:
"It is the extraordinary combination of lyricism and storytelling in which Carson captures this idea [of memory] that makes me want, having finished the book, to return to it perpetually."
Wes Davis, The Yale Review, January 2009

"Long hailed as a master poet in his native Ireland, Carson fortifies his reputation here with this meditation on love and mystery that takes the classical fugue as its model."
Publishers' Weekly Best Books of the Year (one of only five poetry titles selected)

* * * * * * * * * *
The Currach Requires No Harbours
by Medbh McGuckian:
"These poetic recalibrations, both subtle and subversive set The Currach Requires No Harbours apart from her other recent collections and confirm McGuckian as a poet whose verse is as innovative as it is discomfiting."
Heather Clark, Harvard Review, Spring 2009

* * * * * * * * * * *
The New North, edited by Chris Agee:
"Wake Forest University Press continues its impressive dedication to Irish poetry ... with The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland. ...[T]he poems and poets offer an insightful, lyrical look into the psyche of 21st-century Northern Ireland." Irish America Magazine, Feb./March2009

...

Our Press in the News

Wake Forest University Press is North America's leading publisher of Irish poetry. Read the full story.

To hear some of our poets read: Listen...

Poem of the Month

Etch

i.m. Osip Mandelstam

What was not committed to birch bark
was scribed in the memory of the hushed zeks
who tooks Osip's poem to heart.

His poem I write in my own breath
on the windowpane, the dear Irish rain
falling to the garden's purple vetch.

I'll spill acid on this plate
and fetch from deepest darkest shade
the lines that scarred the prisoner's face;

the light that struck in that most wretched place--
the wolves' tracking howl,
the birches singing out the forest's fate.

Paula Meehan, from Painting Rain