Reintroducing Poplar Press!

Here's some exciting news from OBPO member, Wolsak and Wynn, as they open up a new imprint for the press. The details are below, in their official release:

Wolsak and Wynn is happy to announce that long-time members of the press Ashley Hisson and Jennifer Rawlinson will be heading up a dedicated speculative fiction imprint. This will be a renewal of Poplar Press, which will now bring out two works of speculative fiction a year. Award-winning speculative fiction author Andrew Wilmot will be joining them on an editorial advisory board. 

Poplar Press was an imprint created by publisher Noelle Allen early in her years of managing Wolsak and Wynn, when the press was primarily a publisher of poetry. It was intended as a home for some of the more mainstream titles acquired by the press, including works of speculative fiction. This new version of the imprint will both realize and refine that early intent. 

The new vision for Poplar Press is to be a place for untraditional takes on the speculative, particularly those stories told with a feminist lens or from underserved communities. Between the three of them, the editors are interested in a wide range of subgenres – from horror to high fantasy to sci-fi to new weird to alternative history and beyond – but above all they are looking for character-driven stories. 

“I’ve long felt that there has been a lack of strong publishing options for writers of speculative fiction in Canada,” said publisher Noelle Allen. “But to do it well you need people who understand and respect the community and who read widely and thoughtfully in the speculative fiction genre, as Ashley Hisson, Jennifer Rawlinson and Andrew Wilmot do. I am delighted to turn this imprint over to the three of them and I am very excited about the books which they will acquire.” 

The first publication for the new Poplar Press imprint will come out in spring 2023. 

More about the editors: 

Ashley Hisson is the managing editor at Wolsak and Wynn, where she started at as intern in 2008. She has an honours BA in English and Classical Civilizations from the University of Toronto and a certificate in publishing from Centennial College. Ashley has volunteered for gritLIt: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival and for industry associations including the Literary Press Group and the Ontario Book Publishers Organization. She regularly attends speculative fiction, comic and pop culture conventions, and is an avid knitter. 

Jennifer Rawlinson is the production coordinator at Wolsak and Wynn, where she started as an intern in 2017. She writes for the Hamilton Review of Books and various spooky publications and helps run Hamilton’s literary festival, gritLIT. In her free time Jen can be found scaring herself with books and movies. 

Andrew Wilmot (BFA, MPub) is a writer and editor based out of Toronto, Ontario. They have won awards for screenwriting and short fiction, with credits including myriad online and in-print 

publications and anthologies. Andrew is also Co-Publisher and Co-EIC, alongside editors Michael Matheson and Chinelo Onwualu, of the online magazine Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Books they’ve worked on have taken home multiple awards from the Sunburst Awards, the Eisner Awards and the Shirley Jackson Awards. The Death Scene Artist, their debut novel, came out with Wolsak and Wynn’s Buckrider Books imprint in 2018. 

More about Wolsak and Wynn Publishers: 

Wolsak and Wynn was formed in 1982 by poets Marja Jacobs and Heather Cadsby and was dedicated to publishing Canadian poetry for the first twenty-five years of its existence, winning many awards for their collections. In 2006 the press changed hands to the current publisher, Noelle Allen, and has grown to be a wide-ranging literary press, which publishes in many genres and continues to win awards. 

For more information contact Noelle Allen at noelle.allen@wolsakandwynn.ca