a Publisher of innovative poetry that celebrates UNIQUENESS, surprise, and diversity of form.

A Brief History of
The Waywiser Press

In the summer of 1997, after a week spent interviewing the poet W.D. Snodgrass at his home in upstate New York, Philip Hoy realized he had far too much good material for a magazine article. The result was W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy, the first in a series of book-length interviews with eminent older poets. Over the next few years, the micro-press known as Between The Lines (BTL) would publish expansive dialogues with John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, and many others, to considerable acclaim. Hecht described his written exchange with Hoy as the closest thing to an autobiography he would ever produce.

Buoyed by the success of Between The Lines, Hoy launched the Waywiser Press in 2001, a literary press with a special focus on American poets that he felt were undervalued in England. In the years that followed, Waywiser brought out UK editions of new collections by Richard Wilbur, B.H. Fairchild, and Mark Strand, and debut books by Deborah Warren, Clive Watkins, and Joseph Harrison, among many others.

Harrison joined the press as Senior American Editor in 2003, and under his leadership Waywiser launched the annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize for a first or second book, which is now in its 21st year. Judged by such luminaries as Charles Simic, Richard Wilbur, Rosanna Warren, Vijay Seshadri, Linda Gregerson, and Paul Muldoon, it has become one of the premier early-career prizes for poetry in English.

Hoy has acquired a reputation for identifying overlooked masterpieces. In 2012, praising the press for finally making David Ferry’s poetry available in England, Sir Christopher Ricks called Waywiser

Two years later, Morri Creech’s The Sleep of Reason was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Along with its enviable poetry catalogue, Waywiser has distinguished itself through the years by bringing out celebrated works of fiction, such as Gabriel Roth’s The Unknowns; criticism, such as Mark Ford’s A Driftwood Altar; poetry in translation, such as George Bradley’s Late Montale; and memoir, such as Richard Wollheim’s Germs: A Memoir of Childhood. The latter two have recently been republished in the NYRB Classics series.

With his retirement at the end of 2025, Hoy will hand the press’s mission and the Hecht Prize catalogue over to Waywiser Books, a nonprofit successor based in the U.S. Comprising four longtime members of the press’s board and several new faces, the Waywiser Books editorial team intends to honor, sustain, and strengthen Waywiser’s legacy by championing writing that is at once innovative and aware of formal inheritances; promoting both emerging and established voices; and publishing striking, intelligent, and memorable books in elegant physical form — looking back with gratitude and forward with enthusiasm.