One of "the country's most respected and prestigious poetry presses", and a "pro", Copper Canyon Press achieved national attention when their poet
W.S. Merwin won the 2005
National Book Award for Poetry in the same year another Copper Canyon poet,
Ted Kooser, won the 2005
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was appointed to a second year as
United States Poet Laureate. Merwin later won the 2009
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and in 2010 was named
United States Poet Laureate. Copper Canyon has published more than 400 titles, including works by the
Nobel Prize laureates
Pablo Neruda,
Odysseas Elytis,
Octavio Paz,
Vicente Aleixandre and
Rabindranath Tagore;
Pulitzer Prize-winners
Ted Kooser,
Carolyn Kizer,
Maxine Kumin,
Theodore Roethke, and
W.S. Merwin;
National Book Award winners
Hayden Carruth,
Lucille Clifton, and
Ruth Stone; and some contemporary poets and translators such as
Jim Harrison,
C. D. Wright,
Bill Porter (aka Red Pine),
Norman Dubie,
Eleanor Wilner,
Arthur Sze,
James Richardson, Tom Hennen and
Lucia Perillo. In 2003 it published the
Complete Poems of
Kenneth Rexroth. The press published
What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford to great critical acclaim in 2015. In his New York Times review, Dwight Garner complimented the press for performing a "vital and difficult task" and giving the reader "a chance to see him (Stanford) whole." National Public Radio called the book's release "the big event in poetry for 2015." Also in 2015, Copper Canyon Press acquired the U.S. rights to a manuscript of lost poems by the
Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. Discovered by archivists from The Pablo Neruda Foundation in the summer of 2014 just after the April 2013 exhumation of Neruda's body in Chile, this collection of poems has been called "a literary event of universal importance" and "the biggest find in Spanish literature in recent years". The collection,
Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems, translated by Pulitzer finalist
Forrest Gander, was released in April 2016 and includes full-color, facsimile presentations of Neruda's handwritten poems. Copper Canyon was also awarded the rights to publish Neruda's first book,
Crepusulario, which has also never appeared in the U.S. in English translation. Natasha Rao's
Latitude was the winner of the 2021 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry.
Jorie Graham's
To 2040 was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry, and
Jennifer Chang's
An Authentic Life in 2025. The poets
Richard Siken and
Gabrielle Calvocoressi were finalists for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, whereas Natalie Shapero was on the longlist for
Stay Dead. ==Major prizes==