Dryad Press

Dryad Press is an independent literary press based in the Takoma Park, MD and San Francisco, CA. The press was founded in the November 1967 by Merrill Leffler and Neil Lehrman with the first issue of Dryad. The literary magazine began as a quarterly and then evolved into a more irregular publication.

They began publishing books with Rod Jellema's Something Tugging the Line followed by many others, among them, books by James Wright, Roland Flint, Myra Sklarew, Linda Pastan, Paul Zimmer, Philip Jason, Roger Aplon, Barbara Lefcowitz, Ann Darr, Rodger Kamenetz, and Herman Taube.

Dryad Press has acquired a reputation as a sterling publisher of good poetry. In 1975 the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet James Wright wrote of the importance of Dryad Press as an independent publisher: "My devotion to Dryad Press and all its works is something more than aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of its design and the excellence of its authors. It is a devotion that might almost be called a sense of relief. I see appearing all around me so many splendid writers; and yet I know that most of them would never appear at all through large commercial publishers.  We are coming back where we belong in America in one realm of life, at any rate: the publication of real poetry by small independent presses.  Dryad is very beautiful."

In 1976 the press published a book edited by Marguerite Harris, which included poems by Robert Lowell, William Meredith, Peter Davison, David Ignatow, Ted Kooser, William Matthews, and Ed Zahniser. In November 2007 the press released Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, the memoir of Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore.

Dryad Press also published The Wild Piano by Barbara Lefcowitz in 1981.