About The Waywiser Press

"Since the accountancy department at Oxford University Press closed down its rival, the poetry department, there has been a gap in British poetry publishing. Almost invisibly, Philip Hoy's Waywiser Press has begun to fill the gap, publishing a small group of poets in handsome little volumes at wonderfully low prices ..." – Jim McCue, The Times   "Be grateful that small presses like Waywiser still exist." – Thomas Jones, London Review of Books

Background The Waywiser Press is a small independent company, with its main office in the UK, and a subsidiary in the USA. It was founded in late 2001, and started publishing in 2002. Waywiser is a literary press, first and foremost, with a special interest in modern poetry and fiction. From time to time, however, we also issue books belonging to other literary genres – e.g. memoir, criticism, history. We are keen to promote the work of new as well as established authors, and would like to rescue still others from undeserved neglect.

Editorial Board Managing Editor Philip Hoy Philip Hoy was born in London in 1952, and educated at the Universities of York and Leeds. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy, a subject he taught for many years, first in the UK and then overseas. As well as founding and managing The Waywiser Press, he co-founded and manages Between The Lines, a press devoted to publishing book-length interviews with contemporary poets. He presently resides in Surrey. His most recent publications are W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between The Lines, London, 1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between The Lines, London, 1999, 2001), and Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between The Lines, London, 2001). An interview with Hoy concerning Between The Lines was recently published in The Dark Horse: "The Interviewer Interviewed: N.S Thompson talks to Philip Hoy, editor of Between The Lines", The Dark Horse, 15, Summer 2003: 40-46. This interview can be read on-line at: http://www.waywiser-press.com/imprints/darkhorse.html Associate Editors Joseph Harrison Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1957, grew up in northern Virginia and Alabama, and took his BA from Yale in 1979 and his MA from Johns Hopkins in 1986. His poems have appeared in various journals, amongst them The Antioch Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 1998. His book Someone Else's Name was published by Waywiser in the UK in 2003 and by Zoo Press in the USA, and was a runner-up for the 2005 Poet's Prize. His most recent poetry collection is Identity Theft, published by Waywiser in 2008. In 2005 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.   Clive Watkins Clive Watkins was born in Sheffield in 1945 and grew up and was educated in Liverpool. He took a law degree but, repenting of that profession, became a teacher. On his retirement in 1998, he was head teacher of one of the oldest secondary schools in Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Agenda, Outposts, Poetry Durham, Poetry Wales, The Hudson Review, The Malahat Review, The New Welsh Review, The Rialto and The Dark Horse. He has also published papers on Conrad Aiken and Wallace Stevens, and on translations of Shakespeare and Montale. Jigsaw, his first collection of poems, was published by Waywiser in 2003. He is married and has three grown-up children. He and his wife live in a small village on the edge of the Yorkshire Pennines.   Greg Williamson Greg Williamson was born in 1964 and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He was educated at Vanderbilt, Wisconsin-Madison and Johns Hopkins Universities, and is the author of three collections of poetry, The Silent Partner (Story Line Press, 1995), Errors in the Script (Sewanee Writers' Series/The Overlook Press, 2001), and, most recently, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck (Waywiser, 2008). Williamson's poetry has earned him the Nathan Haskell Dole Prize, the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, a John Atherton Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Duluth, Georgia.

A note for the curious "Waywiser" Way"wis`er. Now Hist. 1651. [Formed after German. wegweiser (= Dutch wegwijzer, Swedish vägvisare, Danish vejviser), f. weg way n.1 + weiser, agent-n. f. weisen show.] The English sense is not found in the other Teutonic languages. In German the word has, besides its primary sense of "one who or something which shows the way", several other meanings, the most common being "guide-post", which is also current in Dutch, Danish and Swedish.] 1. An instrument for measuring and indicating a distance travelled by road. Of various forms, usually operated either by the step of the pedestrian or by the revolution of the wheels of the vehicle. [Adapted from the OED] A waywiser, as illustrated on the copyright page of John Ogilby's Britannia, Volume the First: Or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales: Description of the Principal Roads Thereof (M.DC.LXXV)