Copper Canyon Gets International Literary Exchange Award for Chinese Poetry Anthology

by Staff
5.12.09

Copper Canyon Press is the latest publisher to receive an International Literary Exchange Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The public agency announced last Thursday that the press, based in Port Townsend, Washington, will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication, and promotion of a bilingual anthology of Chinese poetry.

As part of the International Literary Exchanges program, which was launched by the NEA in 2006 "to promote the exchange of great world literature across borders," an anthology of American poets, edited by David Mason, will be published concurrently by the General Administration of Press and Publication in China.

The Copper Canyon anthology will be edited by Qingping Wang and include the work of thirty to forty Chinese poets born after 1945. It will be cotranslated by Chinese literature scholars Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. Publication is expected sometime in 2011.

Other presses who have recently won the competitive grants from the NEA include Wake Forest University Press for the publication of The New North: Contemporary Poetry From Northern Ireland and Dalkey Archive Press for Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction.

"We look forward to partnering with Copper Canyon Press to extend these cross-cultural conversations to China, which will assist in enriching the cultural lives of both nations," said NEA acting chairman Patrice Walker Powell in a press release.