About

World Poetry is a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation, founded in 2017 and based in New York City. We publish from a broad range of languages and traditions, bringing the work of modern masters, emerging voices, and pioneering innovators from around the world to English-language readers in affordable, high-quality trade editions.

Our books have been reviewed and excerpted widely—in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Publishers Weekly, The Los Angeles Review, and LitHub, among many others—and several have received awards, including the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Our titles are usually published in facing-page, bilingual formats, most are new translations, and many signal an author’s first significant publication in English.

As our mission includes the promotion of translators, both established and emerging, we offer fair contracts with fees and royalties, and the translators of our books receive a wealth of editorial feedback as well as support for public speaking engagements, magazine publication, and media attention. Every effort is made for the translators’ work to reach a broad audience that includes scholars and students as well as the general readership.

Since 2022, World Poetry also produces the Colloquy: Translators in Conversation series, providing a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation, with six to eight events per year presented in collaboration with New York City institutions and independent bookstores. (For more information and a list of events click on the Colloquy link in the footer.)

Working together with the Translation Program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs), World Poetry offers publishing internships, sponsors student translation awards and summer research grants, organizes translation reading and class visits by translators, and lends logistical support to the program’s magazine World Poetry Review.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and registered New York State charity, we are happy to accept tax-deductible donations. Our work is supported by charitable foundations, foreign cultural ministries, and individual donors.