Harvardwood Publishing is relaunching this spring with a whole host of new initiatives to develop and expand the imprint and its reach. Patricia Danaher is the new Director of Harvardwood Publishing, and she spokes to us about her plans.
I’m very excited to be announcing a wide range of new activities for Harvardwood. Late next month, we will be launching our first anthology, a co- publication with the Harvard Review, which will feature work from Seamus Heaney, Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexia, Sharon Olds and Tony Hoagland, among many others. Harvard Review editor, Christina Thompson is working very enthusiastically with Harvardwood Publishing on this and other future collaborations.
Our first anthology will have the passage of time as its theme and is dedicated to the memory of Nobel laureaute Seamus Heaney who was a longtime friend of the Harvard Review and a member of its board. We will have launches in Cambridge, New York and LA.
Later this year, we plan to publish a second anthology, which will feature new work from a broad range of writers. We will announce the theme and the submissions criteria in April. Several future anthologies are planned.
Q. What else is on the cards?
A. We are looking at making Harvardwood Publishing a serious new standalone, literary imprint, primarily an electronic one. We aim to publish fiction across a wide variety of genres and will be considering work from within and without the Harvard network. While we will mostly publish in the English language, down the line we hope to consider work in Spanish and other languages.
Q. Tell us about the Harvardwood Literary Workshops.
A. As part of efforts to expand awareness of the Harvardwood brand, we have begun offering writers in Los Angeles a range classes where they can develop their writing or explore new genres. So far, we have classes in crime writing, memoir, short stories, essays and espionage. We will be adding Young Adult, science fiction, erotica and children’s writing classes later in the Spring. Our instructors are also working as consulting editors on our publishing ventures.
Q. There’s been talk about launching the Harvardwood Literary Prize. Tell us something about this.
A. We are talking to a number of select potential corporate sponsors to get behind, what we hope will become a major international literary award, like the Booker or the National Book Award. We are also working to put together a panel of famous international writers to judge the award. It will be run in conjunction with libraries and publishers around the world.
Given the feedback we have received, there is every chance that in the future we will have separate awards for science fiction and crime writing in addition to one major prize for a work written or translated into the English language in the previous year.