Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass's newest book is Indigo (2020). Among her previous books are Like a Beggar (2014), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award, The Human Line (2007), and Mules of Love (2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. She coedited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (1973). Among her other honors are three Pushcart Prizes, the Pablo Neruda Prize, Larry Levis Prize, New Letters Prize, and Fellowships from the NEA and the California Arts Council. Her poetry appears frequently in The New Yorker,  American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Bass is also coauthor of the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988, 2008), and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (1996). A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz County jails, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA program in writing at Pacific University.

Photo Credit: Irene Young

Amanda Gunn

Amanda Gunn is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard, where she works on Black pleasure and ephemerality. Her poems, whose subjects include women's labors, mental illness, addiction, and desire and the fat body, appear in Poetry, Poetry NW, and The Baffler. She is currently a Stegner Fellow

Red Pine

Bill Porter assumes the pen nam Red Pine for his translation work. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943, grew up in the Idaho Panhandle, served a tour of duty in the US Army, graduated from the University of California with a degree in anthropology, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and eventually found work at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he interviewed local dignitaries and produced more than a thousand programs about his travels in China. His translations have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN Translation Prize, and the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on a book based on a pilgrimage to the graves and homes of China’s greatest poets of the past, which was published under the title Finding Them Gone in January 2016. More recently, Porter received the 2018 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Photo Credit: Copper Canyon Press

Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is the author of three works of nonfiction, including The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam, and six collections of poetry, most recently Nightingale. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. She teaches at the University of Utah and served as Utah’s poet laureate.

Photo Credit: Emily London Portraits

Michael Wiegers

Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief. He is the editor of A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry, which celebrates Copper Canyon Press’s fifty-year anniversary. He has edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. He edited the anthologies The Poet’s Child and This Art and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he coedited with Mónica de la Torre. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative and regularly speaks about the art of publishing at universities and colleges around the world. He is currently at work on a book about the poet W.S. Merwin.

Photo Credit: Miriam Berkley