Bruce Wilcox, Director of the University of Massachusetts Press
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Bruce Wilcox, Director of the University of Massachusetts Press. Based in Amherst, Mass., this well-known academic and literary publisher offers the prestigious Juniper Prizes for Poetry and Fiction.
The Juniper Prize for Poetry (deadline September 30; don't enter before August 1), established in 1975, alternates between a first-book contest in odd-numbered years and a contest for manuscripts by authors with prior book publication in even-numbered years. Past winners in the series have included Laura Kasischke, Diane Glancy and Michael Dumanis. The award was named in honor of the poet Robert Francis, who for many years lived at Fort Juniper in Amherst.
The Juniper Prize for Fiction (deadline September 30; don't enter before August 1), launched in 2004, seeks book-length collections of literary fiction, which can be novels or collections of short stories and novellas.
Wilcox has overseen publication of the winning books for the past 24 years. He started his publishing career at the University of Washington Press in 1970 and became director of the University of Massachusetts Press in 1982. He has also served as president of the Association of American University Presses. Here, he shares with us some thoughts about the history and direction of the Juniper series.
Q: What was the original vision behind the Juniper Prize series? How has it changed over the decades that the prize has been offered?
A: Leone Stein, the founding director of the press, is the person who conceived and launched the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She had already published a number of poets under the UMass Press imprint—Robert Francis, Anne Halley and others. She thought it would be interesting and useful to start a contest that would enable new voices to be heard. There was no grand plan. But as time went on and the Juniper Prize became more widely known, the number of submissions increased. Eventually, with more than 600 manuscripts arriving each year, we decided to cut the workload of the judges and improve the odds for the poets by alternating between first books and subsequent books. That's how it works today.
Q: What changes have you seen in the world of poetry manuscript contests since the Juniper Prize began—e.g. aesthetic preferences, volume of contests, background of winning authors? What is your opinion of those developments?
A: Well, of course there are now many more contests than there were in 1975. And there has been a good deal of debate about whether contests are good or bad for literary culture, whether MFA programs have enhanced or homogenized creative writing, and whether judges are truly open to new work that cuts against the grain. I am reluctant to generalize. But it does seem to me that the large corporate publishers—the managers of the literary-industrial complex—are devoting less and less attention to serious literary work. And yet in the age of the Internet, writers now have new channels at their disposal, new ways to be published. There are dozens of literary contests, small presses sprouting up all over the place, and any number of websites where poetry and fiction are posted. Those are positive developments.
Q: Who, if anyone, screens the manuscripts for your poetry and fiction awards before the final judges read them? How are screeners trained or instructed?
A: Our screeners are selected by our judges. They all meet together each fall to go over the general ground rules. The judges ask the screeners to be alert for unusual voices and styles and to look for striking, fresh work.
Q: I understand that the judges of the current contest prefer to remain anonymous. Can you comment on that?
A: We want our judges to be completely free of pressure, which is why we allow them to remain anonymous. In recent years, we have had a panel of three judges for the poetry contest. They read the finalists together—that is, they sit together in the same room, passing the manuscripts around and gradually circling in on a winner. They say they look for a manuscript that they keep returning to read, because of its content and style. They like to be surprised, to be startled by the quality and originality of the poems. Often, they agonize at the end when they are down to the last few manuscripts and are obliged to select just one.
Q: Your recent winners have tended to have significant publication credits, even for the first-book contest. Is a writer's publication history a factor in the judging process? Do you have any opinion about the merits of blind-judged contests as opposed to ones where the author is known?
A: No, a writer's publication history is not a factor in the judging process here. The contest is judged blind. That said, I think it is perfectly reasonable for other contests to take a different approach. As long as the publisher is clear and open about the procedures, writers are free to choose whether or not to submit to a particular contest.
Q: Once authors have been published in the Juniper Prize series, are they likely to have a long-term relationship with the University of Massachusetts Press? Some literary publishers automatically consider an author's subsequent book for publication once she has won their contest, whereas others insist that she go back into the general contest submission pool for each manuscript. What is your policy?
A: We don't have the resources to publish subsequent volumes by Juniper winners. We wish all of our authors well and we do what we can to help them. But poetry and fiction are only a small part of our list. Traditionally, the mission of the university press has been to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to serve scholars and scholarship. That translates into an emphasis on serious nonfiction. But we have managed to continue to publish at least a few volumes of poetry and fiction every year. You can see the full range of our publishing program if you visit our website.
Q: What was the career trajectory of the early winners of the first-book prize? Did many of them go on to achieve poetic fame? Are there some that you would particularly like to see rediscovered?
A: Some of the Juniper poets have done very well. Lucille Clifton went on to win the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, and an Emmy Award. In 1988, she became the first author to have two books of poetry selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. But not all Juniper winners have had such good luck. Lynda Hull, a brilliant poet who left home at age sixteen, won the Juniper Prize in 1986 for a collection entitled Ghost Money. Tragically, she died in a car accident in 1994. I believe that Graywolf Press will be releasing a volume of her collected poems later this year. She deserves a wider audience.
Q: My (unscientific) impression is that there are more fiction manuscript contests than there were a decade ago. Is this a real trend, and if so, what's behind it? What was the press's motivation for adding a fiction prize in 2004?
A: I don't know if this is a trend or not. In part, it may be in response to the perception that large commercial presses are increasingly reluctant to publish serious fiction, particularly experimental fiction. In our case, several faculty members from the UMass MFA program urged us to start a fiction contest parallel to the poetry contest. The MFA program has been expanding its "Juniper Initiative", which now includes a literary festival in the spring, a summer writing institute, a reading series and other activities. The fiction contest seemed an appropriate addition. So now we publish on an annual basis the Juniper Prize for Poetry, the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and also the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, which we've been doing in cooperation with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) since 1990.
Q: Does your press have a distinctive aesthetic and/or interest in particular subjects, and if so, how would you describe those?
A: I hope we aren't defined by a particular aesthetic or focus. We are always pleased to publish a really fine manuscript from terra incognita.
Q: What factors make the difference between a collection of good poems/stories and a coherent, prizewinning manuscript? Any advice for entrants with respect to selecting and arranging their work into the best possible book?
A: I would say, take the time to construct the manuscript as if you were building a house. Pay careful attention to detail. But don't lose sight of the larger structure. In the end, every piece should contribute to the whole.
Q: What do you see as the role of university presses in the literary writing community?
A: I hope and trust that universities will continue to publish creative work, just as I hope and trust that universities will continue to hire and support creative writers, as teachers and as writers-in-residence. It is all part of what a university ought to be about.
Summer 2006
