Wave Books


Wave Books is an American independent press focusing on the publication of poetry, with a focus on innovative, contemporary poetry and poetry in translation. Books published by Wave have been finalists for and winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature,
the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the National Book Award for Poetry. Writers published by Wave Books include CAConrad, Don Mee Choi, Timothy Donnelly, Kate Durbin, Renee Gladman, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Douglas Kearney, Dorothea Lasky, Ben Lerner, Chelsey Minnis, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Hoa Nguyen, Mary Ruefle, Rachel Zucker, and others.

Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour 2006

Poetry Bus Tour was a literary event sponsored by Wave Books in 2006. It featured a tour of contemporary poets, traveling by a forty-foot Biodiesel bus, who stopped to perform in fifty North American cities over the course of fifty days.

Wave's Annual Poetry Festival 2011: Poetry in Translation

Every two years from 2009-2013 Wave Books presented three days of poetry. It held three days of poetry in translation November 4–6, 2011, with the help of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. The event featured film screenings, art exhibitions, lectures, discussions and readings with featured poets and translators.

Book design

Wave books are published with simple covers, lacking the marketing blurbs common in the publishing world. Its translations avoid the use of facing pages of original and translated text, and the translation of Olio includes foldout, detachable pages.
In 2021 Wave began producing its first audiobooks that are recorded as read by the author in a live audience setting.

Selected publications

Sho by Douglas Kearney, 2022 AMANDA PARADISE by CAConrad, September 2021A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen, April 2021 DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi, April 2020 Olio by Tyehimba Jess, April 2016 Yi Sang: Selected Works edited by Don Mee Choi, September 2020The Pedestrians by Rachel Zucker, April 2014If I Don't Breathe How Do I Sleep by Joe Wenderoth, April 2014Talkativeness by Michael Earl Craig, April 2014Language Arts by Cedar Sigo, April 2014Etruria by Rodney Koeneke, April 2014Poems by Robert Lax, November 2013Soul in Space by Noelle Kocot, October 2013Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle, October 2013. The Inside of an Apple by Joshua Beckman, September 2013People on Sunday by Geoffrey G. O'Brien, September 2013