Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years of Copper Canyon Press

A compendium of stories about the importance of poems in people’s lives, accumulating a remarkable history of Copper Canyon Press.

For its fiftieth anniversary, Copper Canyon Press invited a broad community of staffers, board members, and poets to help curate a celebratory anthology that it named A House Called Tomorrow. The response to that invitation, however, exceeded the book. The Press received so many stories about the poems, from people far and wide, that it knew it had to publish a second volume--this one.

Come Shining is both an oral (and visual) history of Copper Canyon Press and a lasting testament to the power of poetry within people’s lives. If A House Called Tomorrow is the birthday cake, this is the birthday party: a joyous din of reminiscences, laughter, support, and yet more poems, all bound between two covers. Contributor stories are organized across thematic sections--such as ＂Personal Voltas＂ and ＂Stories for Our Tomorrow＂--and are accompanied by a timeline of the Press, historic photos, and facsimiles of touching notes that Copper Canyon has received from readers and poets. The result is a remarkable account of a half-century of publishing, proof positive that poetry is, indeed, vital to language and living.

About the Editors

Michael Wiegers is the Executive Editor of Copper Canyon Press where, over the past three decades, he has edited and published more than five hundred titles. He additionally serves as poetry editor for Narrative. Wiegers edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, What About This (a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Hidden Water (with Chet Weise), and he is also the editor of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (with Mónica de la Torre), The Poet’s Child, and This Art: Poems about Poetry. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and is writing a book about W.S. Merwin.

Kaci X. Tavares is a bilingual poet and editor from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is currently Copper Canyon Press’s Publishing Fellow, and was recently a writing mentor with the New York-based nonprofit Girls Write Now. With the University of East Anglia Publishing Project, she co-edited the 2020 Poetry MA Anthology (Egg Box Publishing), and offered English-language guidance to literary translators. She holds degrees in English and English Education from Boston University, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.