For anyone who pays attention to major literary awards, it will come as no surprise that university presses figure prominently among celebrated and vigorous publishers of contemporary poetry. In the past year alone, Tripas by Brandon Som (The Georgia Review and University of Georgia Press) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (University of Akron Press) won the National Book Award for poetry, and Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan University Press) won the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Poetry publishing constitutes an important dimension of university presses’ mission to cultivate human knowledge. It is also an enduring one. A list of US Poet Laureates reveals numerous university press authors, from Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren in the 1940s to Natasha Trethewey, Charles Wright, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo in the past decade.
University press authors regularly shine on long- and short-lists for the most prestigious poetry awards; for example, since 2000, more than twenty university press poets have been honored as National Book Award finalists.
Today, forty-six members of the Association of University Presses publish poetry. (While this article features authors who have published with American presses, a quick look at the AUPresses Subject Area Grid reveals university presses around the globe that support the vital creative work of poets—from University of Alberta Press, American University in Cairo Press, and Chinese University of Hong Kong Press to UJ Press (Johannesburg), Liverpool University Press, and Otago University Press.) Importantly, many of these presses identify and nurture first-time authors by sponsoring publication prizes.
As National Poetry Month begins, let’s take a closer look at poetry publishing by university presses. Below, six poets—Ariana Benson, Peter Gizzi, Romeo Oriogun, V. Penelope Pelizzon, Greg Rappleye, and Jess Smith—describe their publishing experiences with a number of university presses and reflect on these presses’ importance to the genre.
–Annette Windhorn, Association of University Presses
*
Why are University Presses critical to the health of contemporary poetry?
Greg Rappleye: Those of us who do not live on the Dream Coasts may be comforted by the fact that university presses have a well-deserved reputation of publishing what is (in their good judgment) the best work that rockets across the transom, with less regard given to “name,” school, or stylistic affiliation. That seems not-so true for the so-called “big five,” or for smaller independent presses which may favor particular schools or demographics.
Yes, every press is a necessary press, and God bless them all and the books they publish! But the particular attention paid by the university presses to the breadth of contemporary poetry, and their general commitment to the book itself as art form and as a necessary and valuable artifact, seem essential.
Jess Smith: As Greg notes, university presses tend to have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in contemporary poetry—of its movement and connections to other art forms and cultural movements.
I feel intimately involved in the process of designing, marketing, and generally shepherding my book into the world with the University of Akron Press, meaning that I have stayed attentive to the book as a physical item, a time capsule, and not just a list of poems I wrote a few years ago.
Penelope Pelizzon: One of the great strengths of university presses writ large is their frequent commitment to regional issues and voices. In some cases this is reflected in the poetry list, as with Louisiana State University’ Press’s Southern Messenger Poetry Series. In other cases, a university press’s focus on specific cultural themes or issues anchors their poetry publishing in those same areas.
The particular attention paid by the university presses to the breadth of contemporary poetry, and their general commitment to the book itself as art form and as a necessary and valuable artifact, seem essential.I’m thinking of a recent book like Miller Oberman’s Impossible Things, exploring the experiences of being a trans dad, published alongside other titles in Duke University’s queer theory/LGBTQ+ studies subject area. These are benefits of scale: a university publisher, often unlike a small press, is publishing enough titles to have multiple areas of focus and to generate a critical mass of titles in those areas.
Romeo Oriogun: In my case, I think university presses have been really important in giving new life to American poetry, especially by publishing international poets and creating spaces like the African Poetry Series at the University of Nebraska Press. These spaces aren’t just about showcasing different voices—they act as bridges between various literary traditions and cultures.
By giving international poets a platform, they introduce readers to fresh ideas and perspectives that push the boundaries of contemporary poetry. This kind of cross-cultural exchange makes American poetry richer, adding new rhythms, themes, and ways of thinking to the mix. It keeps the poetry world here dynamic and connected to the broader world, especially in times like these when the US and other Western countries are pursuing nationalistic agendas.
Now, more than ever, we need to hear each other and learn from different cultures. These spaces are where those conversations can actually happen.
Peter Gizzi: Besides publishing recent poetry I believe a very significant and enormously important role that university presses can provide are producing texts of record, by that I mean to say, collected works and collected poems. This used to be the bread and butter of university presses but to my mind I think that Suzanna [Tamminen] at Wesleyan University Press is one of the very very few left who publishes these important and necessary publications.
Another great feature with Wesleyan is that they’ve kept all my books in print through multiple printings for the last twenty-five years. If I went with a commercial house I’m sure that wouldn’t be the case or they would be pulped or print-on-demand or some such thing.
So there’s many benefits to being published by Wesleyan, along with the fact that their poetry program is over sixty years old now and that their focus is on dance, musicology, and poetry. Their commitment to the art is total.
Ariana Benson: I think poetry, as it stands today, is a form that thrives best when sheltered from the demands and expectations of the mainstream market. The market wants what it can sell—a face, a name, a brand. Prioritizing these elements, to my mind, creates a landscape antithetical some of my favorite qualities of poetry: its emotional depth that defies the boundaries of difference, its universal rhythms that are not self-announcing, yet so attuned to the human experience that we cannot help but quiet ourselves in order to hear better.
For we who see and write poetry this way, it’s really crucial to have spaces like the university press that value the sharing of ideas, that understand knowledge is its own currency. I’ve spoken to so many fellow debut poets about a nebulous but palpable pressure that exists to have a “thing,” an easily distinguishable quality through which their writing can be categorized, and understood, and how they’re struggled under the weight of that as they bring their books into the world and offer them to readers.
I think the university press can offer a sort of haven from those pressures, because its mission is more aligned with the initial mission of a writer when they first begin a poem: to share what they’ve learned, what they know, and what they believe to be true about this world.
*
What is your experience publishing with a University Press?
Peter Gizzi: In 1995, my beloved friend and mentor, Rosmarie Waldrop, suggested Wesleyan as a good place to send my second collection. So I dutifully sent it on and it quickly came back and I just imagined it went unread. Then in 1997 I received a letter from Suzanna Tamminen introducing herself and said that she was a junior editor when my manuscript came into the offices and that she was now an acquisitions editor and was curious if the book was still available.
I wrote back and told her that I was almost done editing my next book, Lectures of Jack Spicer. And thus began a relationship that has spanned over twenty-five years now. So from what I thought was a rejection has actually become one of the most significant and rewarding experiences I’ve had throughout my career.
I feel blessed. I’ve had offers to go elsewhere but I’m not sure what any other press could offer me. The fact that Suzanna has stuck by me and allowed me to develop under my own lights and has supported my work is a deep gift and a rare one.
And also, the fact that we have done many archival projects now. This year, 2025, marks Jack Spicer’s centenary. A volume of his Collected Letters and my original 1998 edition of the Lectures are going to be formatted to match the other existing volumes of his Collected Poems and Uncollected Poems and Plays.
I really couldn’t imagine any other editor taking on such a project as The Collected Works of Jack Spicer and seeing it through over decades. All readers of Spicer are in her debt.
Greg Rappleye: In January 2000, I graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and, through the greatest of luck, several weeks later, Alicia Ostriker chose A Path Between Houses, which was basically my graduation manuscript, for the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham Prize. I had submitted to Wisconsin because they published so many poets I admired, such as David Kirby, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Tony Hoagland.
My experience with the University of Wisconsin Press was wonderful; their editors and book design team did a marvelous job, and their efforts on my behalf basically got my “poetry career” off to a marvelous start. In 2007, the University of Arkansas Press published Figured Dark which Enid Shomer had selected for the Miller Williams Poetry Series.
The current series editor, Patricia Smith, chose Barley Child as the 2025 winner of the same publication prize and it has just been released. The design work from Arkansas, in both instances, was fantastic—each book is lovely to look at and to hold. I owe a particular debt to the brilliant and indefatigable Janet Foxman, managing editor at the press, for her fabulous work of editing the somewhat wooly Barley Child manuscript into a gorgeous book.
Jess Smith: I love reading about other poets and their various paths to book publication. For me, I always hoped my first book would end up at a university press, because so many poets I admired (personally and professionally) were with university presses.
My friend Emilia Phillips, for instance, has published five books with the University of Akron Press, and I always thought their collections and their physical books were beautiful, sturdy, surprising. Further, it spoke highly of the press that writers would choose to publish multiple books with them.
When I got the call from Mary Biddinger that Sandra Beasley had selected my book Lady Smith for the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize, I immediately sensed that the press would be careful and deliberate with my work. And to all the emotions attendant to publishing your first book. The whole team has treated me like a star (helping to alleviate anxiety and build confidence) and a novice (never making me feel foolish when my questions were basic or, to me, facile).
The first copies of my book just arrived and I am thrilled to report that it is as beautiful, sturdy, and surprising as I could have wanted in my wildest poet dreams. The press has had a huge year—with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s book Something About Living winning the 2024 National Book Award—and I’m excited to see what the future holds for them, and for university presses in general.
Penelope Pelizzon: With my first book, I went through the soul-draining and expensive process of simultaneously submitting the manuscript to every single first book contest on the face of the earth. Happily, the manuscript was selected for the Hollis Summer’s Prize and gently given some nudges into final shape by wonderful editor David Saunders at Ohio University Press.
Working with the Pitt Poetry Series editors and production team on my most recent book has been dreamy. Pitt had long been a fantasy press for me. (One of the books that travels the world with me is a first edition of Larry Levis’ Winter Stars, with the grave, simple banded cover of the 1980s Pitt Series books.)
But Ed Ochester, whose vision shaped the Pitt Poetry Series for over forty years, had retired shortly before I sent my manuscript. So, it was clearly the end of one remarkable era. At the same time, I was excited to see where the new co-editors—Terrance Hayes, Nancy Krygowski, and Jeffrey McDaniel—might take the series.
It felt like an exciting moment with sparkly new energy and spunkiness, and that’s been the sense I’ve had working with everyone at the press. This is what you can get when you have the stability of a university press behind you: a poetry series that is a venerable institution, a legacy in the best sense, and yet it’s publishing fresh, surprising voices.
Romeo Oriogun: I had been following the work of the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) at the University of Nebraska Press, observing how they nurtured and introduced emerging African poets to a global audience. Their initiatives—the chapbook series, full-length collections, and mentorship programs—created a crucial platform for contemporary African poetry.
In 2017, I was fortunate to win the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, an award founded by Bernardine Evaristo and closely linked to APBF. The prize had already gained a reputation for identifying and supporting promising poets.
Many shortlisted poets went on to publish chapbooks with APBF’s New-Generation African Poets series, an important archive of contemporary African voices. Some, like Safia Elhillo, Saddiq Dzukogi, and Tsitsi Jaji, later published their first books with the African Poetry Series at the University of Nebraska Press, further establishing APBF as a key force in African poetry.
In 2018, several publishers expressed interest in my debut collection, but I knew I wanted to be part of APBF. Beyond simply publishing books, APBF fostered a sense of literary community and ensured African poetry reached audiences far beyond the continent. Their commitment to supporting poets and preserving their voices made it clear that this was the right home for my work.
I shared my manuscript with Kwame Dawes, who took it to APBF’s editorial board. When they accepted it for publication, I felt an immediate sense of belonging. The process was great, and everything was handled smoothly. More than anything, this experience reinforced my belief in the power of poetry to endure, to illuminate, and to connect voices across borders.
Ariana Benson: With Black Pastoral coming together the way it did—over the course of a little more than a year, as a sort of passion-indulgent, pandemic quarantine endeavor—I can’t say I really sought out any one kind of publisher. I remember seemingly hundreds of people were learning how to make sourdough from scratch to pass the fearful hours. My dough was language, the poems I produced, the labored-over loaves.
My book and poetics are deeply rooted in southernness, so in a landscape where so many of the traditional literary publishing spaces can be found above the Mason Dixon, I felt a unique comfort with their staff, catalogue and overall aesthetic.I was still just getting my feet wet, so to speak, in the professional world of poetry when I learned the manuscript had won the Cave Canem Prize. The prize rotates annually among three presses, with that year’s press publishing the manuscript selected by an external judge appointed by Cave Canem. The timing of my win meant that my book would be published with the University of Georgia Press, an outcome that has proven truly fortunate for me and my first book.
Working with the UGA Press team has been a dream. My book and poetics are deeply rooted in southernness, so in a landscape where so many of the traditional literary publishing spaces can be found above the Mason Dixon, I felt a unique comfort with their staff, catalogue and overall aesthetic—on paper, it was truly a great fit.
Beyond the superficial, they understood and accommodated my relative greenness beautifully, clearly communicating every step of the process from copyediting forward, and what would be expected of me along the way.
I so deeply appreciate the way the press was able to balance author empowerment with provision of their own expertise and guidance. I felt we, as artist and publisher, truly trusted each other with the book’s vision, and I think that is a big strength of the university press experience.
*
As universities come increasingly under attack politically, what do you see as the future of University Presses?
Peter Gizzi: Historically, and I mean for centuries, the key role of the free university is to provide freedom of intellectual pursuits. And that is increasingly becoming under attack. It’s happening on so many fronts. Also having worked on three different campuses over thirty years, I’ve seen that universities are becoming corporate and cold.
But the fact that freedom to publish is becoming under attack and there’s a new kind of censorship happening is extraordinarily dangerous. As we all know we’re living in extraordinarily dangerous times. To speak to the idea of presses housed at universities, they are increasingly also becoming eroded and receiving less money now than they did years ago, and are asked to do more with less.
Many university presses are chronically underfunded and therefore understaffed. It’s a shame given the enduring and venerable history of university press publishing. But that’s where we are as a culture—illiterate and misguided.
Romeo Oriogun: As universities come increasingly under attack politically, I can’t help but share Peter Gizzi’s concern about the erosion of intellectual freedom, which has been a cornerstone of higher education for centuries. The growing corporate model of universities, where the focus shifts from critical inquiry to profit-making, is troubling.
We’re seeing a shift away from the ideals of education as a space for free thought. This makes the role of university presses all the more vital, especially in an era where censorship is becoming more normalized.
Like Peter, I worry about how university presses are being underfunded and understaffed, despite their historical and ongoing significance. The financial squeeze they face is even more concerning because these presses have always been instrumental in amplifying marginalized voices, providing space for work that challenges political and cultural norms.
Presses like the African Poetry Series at the University of Nebraska Press are prime examples of how university presses serve as important cultural platforms. Without them, many of the diverse, experimental, and socially conscious works we need today might not find their way into the world.
But despite the strain, I do feel a sense of hope. University presses are resilient, and they continue to fight for spaces of intellectual and artistic expression. While they may face increased political and financial challenges, I believe they will survive, I have to believe.
Greg Rappleye: I suspect (perhaps I should write “hope”) that the university presses will survive political attacks, even in this tragic era of right-wing ascendance and know-nothingism. The more insidious challenge may be posed by the increasing demands of university administrators and financial advisors that university presses “cost justify” their existence.
Must it be the primary goal of a university press to be a profit-making entity? I realize that the experience at Gettysburg College is not entirely on-point with the question, because it doesn’t involve a university press, but surely saving the Gettysburg Review would have been worthwhile. What a beautiful and necessary journal—where I first encountered the poems of Brigit Pegeen Kelly!
I had never heard of Gettysburg College before I picked up a copy of the Review and my once considerable impression of the college was almost entirely based upon the existence and quality of their journal. I don’t think I was alone in this. Why are so many university administrators and cost accountants blinkered to the cultural value and importance—let alone the true financial value to the institution—of their publishing efforts?
Jess Smith: As I noted earlier, I am trying to remain excited for the future of universities and university presses in general. I agree with the sentiments of my fellow writers here—that we are in a fearsome, profit-driven, dangerous time—but I’m hopeful that universities will remain sites of invention and conversation.
It’s hard for me not to take a bleak view of what recent anti-DEI maneuvers might mean for university presses that publish series focused on gender/ queer/trans theory or BIPOC experience.Many of the best writers I know are involved with the American university system in some capacity—or in multiple capacities—and I believe that their generosity of spirit and intellect will help carry us through to a gentler phase. If I didn’t think this, I think I would struggle to keep writing and teaching.
Penelope Pelizzon: I’m perhaps echoing some of Peter’s and Greg’s observations when I say that it’s hard for me not to take a bleak view of what recent anti-DEI maneuvers might mean for university presses that publish series focused on gender/ queer/trans theory or BIPOC experience. Of course, political attacks are on top of whatever imperatives of “economic feasibility” a press faces at its home university, a big problem in and of itself.
As Derek Krisoff notes in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Akron Press just published Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s National Book Award-winning Something About Living—and yet that press was almost closed in 2015 (“This is a Golden Age for University Presses” Feb 7, 2025). At the same time, I take heart from the many publishing successes Krisoff points to, and I hope the strong leadership that’s developed at so many of the university presses my fellow respondents have named can hold the line.
But maybe this question should also be flipped; what is my/our role in supporting the work of university presses? Can I purchase more books, and directly from the press, so all the proceeds go to them? Can I remember to ask my local library to order new poetry books from university press catalogues each season?
When I’m teaching a poetry class where we’re reading a university press book, can I take ninety seconds and point out this fact, explaining what it means? (This would certainly be useful information for students who hope to publish their own books at some point.)
Ariana Benson: I think it’s important to publish scholarship alongside poetry, and to keep the two in figurative conversation in our collective consciousness, as well as physical proximity on the shelves of bookshops. I believe that one of the greatest abilities poetry (and creative writing in general) possesses is translation of life into lyric—it has an uncanny way of taking the facts of this world and pouring them into the container of story and rhyme and image that make real life feel more urgent, and readers more present within it.
I say this as a student who used to say history and science were my least favorite subjects; true, until I encountered them in the pages of a novel or essay collection. Until a Morrison or a Butler, for example, brought them to life. That university presses publish both kinds of writing, scholarly and creative, is critical to sustaining poetry’s role as a way of distilling from complex and interwoven realities a palpable human truth.
Especially now, as the arts and humanities are increasingly under attack, it is important that they lean on each other to support their continued existence—the university press allows for just that.
*
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet and storyteller. Her debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students.
Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), Winner of the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize; Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics (2016), Finalist for the National Book Award; and In Defense of Nothing (2014), all from Wesleyan University Press. He lives in Holyoke, MA.
Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies, Nomad, and The Gathering of Bastards. A finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, he has won the 2022 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature, the 2023 Julie Suk Award, and the 2024 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. A juror for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University.
Penelope Pelizzon’s A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye (Pitt Poetry Series), longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a TLS Book of the Year and one of LitHub’s “Favorite Poetry Collections” of 2024. Her first book, Nostos (Ohio University Press), won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award; her second, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time (The Waywiser Press), was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.
Greg Rappleye’s poems have appeared in Poetry, the Southern Review, the North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His second collection, A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) won the Brittingham Prize. His third and fifth books, Figured Dark (2007) and Barley Child (2025), were published by the University of Arkansas Press in its Miller Williams Poetry Series. He teaches in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Jess Smith is the author of Lady Smith (University of Akron Press, 2025). Originally from Georgia, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the MFA in creative writing. Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, and other journals.
